


The Beauty in Ordinary Things

by mrtinsky



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-06-04 05:51:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 37,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6643924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrtinsky/pseuds/mrtinsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The fifteen-year plan to make Lydia fall in love with him hadn’t originally involved her coming over to his house every day to pour over ancient Latin texts, but Stiles thought it was a nice addition.</p><p>--</p><p>A collection of missing moments I'm telling myself 100% happened between these two idiots - because Teen Wolf will never give us the closure we all need.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Conditional Convergence

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Thanks so much for reading!
> 
> This fic is basically me trying to find my chill after 5B and writing out everything I think must have happened off screen to get Stiles and Lydia from season 2 to where they are now.
> 
> Thanks so much to my best friend soulmate Marissa (gorgeoussimplehousecat on tumblr) for constantly reading and rereading this trash and letting me steal all the absolute best ideas. QUEEN™

* * *

Lydia is convinced that the world would be a much better place if everything functioned a little more like math. In the world of mathematics, things make sense. Numbers are static. The answer is either right or wrong. Formulas don’t change. There are patterns. There are rules.

In the real world, Lydia is quickly learning, everything is much messier. And it infuriates her. She can’t stand everything being so uncertain. In the real world, apparently, rules are completely arbitrary. (For example, that a species could either be a human or a wolf, but not both).

Lydia has decided to be understanding (and only minimally bitter) towards her friends. They had all lied to her, yes, but they had good intentions. She doesn’t want to dwell on the fact that she spent all of last semester feeling like she was losing her mind, because now she knows the truth. And now that she _knows_ , she can’t go back. On this side of the line, there are bigger issues. Lydia feels something collapsing inside herself, leaving a gaping hole that she knows will only be filled when she understands _everything._

Now, she has a _lot_ of questions, and Allison owes her the answers. The only problem is that Allison is also spending her summer 5,987 miles away. France, Lydia decides, completely coincidentally, is the worst country. Her hatred is totally objective and based purely on facts, of course. Paris is full of pick-pockets, the language is ridiculous, the customer service is bad, and don’t even get Lydia started on the military history. Obviously, this has _nothing_ to do with the fact that Allison is there. Lydia doesn’t mind _at all_ that she has been abandoned in Beacon Hills with no one to talk to.

Allison is able to keep in touch a little, but it’s difficult because she’s so busy over there; she only seems to have free time in the early afternoon, which is well past midnight in California. And the wifi connection is spotty at best, so even when they’re able to match up their schedules, the only thing that can come through is choppy and impossible to understand. Lydia knows Allison needed to get away for a bit, and she can’t blame her. But what was so great about France anyway? Couldn’t they have taken their vacation somewhere reasonable? Somewhere within a 100-mile radius?

For the past three weeks since Allison left, Lydia’s only social interaction has been the occasional meal with her mother and, if she was lucky, the reply from Allison to a text she’d sent four hours earlier. Under different circumstances, Lydia wouldn’t mind so much. She’s used to spending time alone. (No one really wants to go shopping with the lunatic whose always having conversations with the hallucination of a dead, homicidal werewolf. Who knew?) Now, though, Lydia can’t stand it. For the first time, she’s reached a problem she won’t be able to figure out on her own. It’s irritating.

Sure, it was nice to know she hadn’t really been losing her mind. But troubling as it had been to think she was hallucinating on a regular basis – Lydia isn’t sure she likes the truth so much, either. Because - and here’s the most aggravating part - the _new_ rules aren’t really even rules. According to Allison, the bite should have either killed or changed her, and at least to the best of Lydia’s knowledge, it hadn’t done either. Pair that with the hallucinations and the fugue states…Lydia’s starting to seriously doubt whether she’s actually human. This mystery consumes her thoughts day and night. There has to be a way this all fits together. There has to be _something_.

Allison tries to answer Lydia’s barrage of questions as best she can, but if the rest of the Argents know anything about it, they aren’t talking. Today, as Lydia proofreads an email to Allison, she counts 24 inquiries that she knows she won’t get the answers to before she just deletes the entire thing out of frustration. Slamming her laptop closed, Lydia starts pacing around the room. She knows she’ll be fine. She just needs a distraction. Something to think about instead of continuing to obsess over this.

Deciding to go through and check the quality of all of her lipsticks (again) her eyes fall on a photo from earlier that year on her mirror. It was taken at the ice-skating rink - before that night had turned into something Lydia was trying not to think about. Lydia, Allison, Scott, and Stiles. They all had stupid grins on their faces, because something about being in the rink when they weren’t supposed to be made everything more exciting. Suddenly, it occurs to her that even though Allison is unavailable, there are still two people who might be able to help her, and they’re only a few blocks away. Spending time with them without Allison seems kind of taboo, somehow, but what else can Lydia do? She can’t stand to sit in this room, getting nowhere, any longer. She sighs. Fine, she thinks, screw distractions. She wants answers, and she’s tired of waiting to get them from France.

Who to call, though? Scott is the obvious choice, because Stiles is, well, Stiles. Awkward, ridiculous Stiles who did really stupid things like drive his jeep through walls and didn’t seem to care how annoyed Lydia got with him. And yet… Lydia finds herself pulling up Stiles’ contact information on her phone. He might be weird, but he’s probably the best choice to get information, she reasons. Scott’s probably too preoccupied with actually turning into a werewolf to really care about the science behind it, but Stiles…Stiles seems the more likely of the two to have really done his research. At least, Lydia hopes he has. (And, if she needed to, she could guilt him into helping her by reminding him of when he left her crying in her car. That would probably never stop working. )

Twenty minutes later, however, standing on his front porch, Lydia thinks she may have just made a huge mistake. There are about three people left in this town that would consider Lydia their friend, and Stiles is one of them, but there’s still something a little daunting about spending time with him one-on-one. She knows he used to have a crush on her (the word ‘crush’ is putting it mildly), and as flattering as that is, she just doesn’t want to deal with it. When Jackson told her he was moving out of the country, it really hit Lydia how much power over her life she had given him, and it made her furious. Jackson, Peter…they had a way of making her feel so small. She doesn’t want to be that Lydia anymore. So, she’s decided, no serious boyfriends. No more thinking about what everyone else wants her to be. No more letting toxic people sink their fangs into her soul.

She’s about to give up completely, because what if coming to his house just encourages him? If he asks her out, and she turns him down, would he still want to help her? Lydia’s past experience with men supports the idea that he wouldn’t. She’s starting to think maybe it would be better to just avoid the situation entirely. But the thought of going back home and continuing the endless cycle of trying to figure this out on her own keeps her rooted to the spot. She’s spent too much of the past year feeling powerless. She’s not about to let anything so stupid as a boy keep her from figuring this out. Whatever, she thinks. She needs answers. If it gets awkward, the new Lydia Martin can handle it. Besides, she tells herself, things with Stiles are different. Out of the two of them, she’s obviously the one in control. She steels herself and rings the doorbell.

 

 

Spending time with Stiles, Lydia must admit, goes much better than she could have anticipated. He hadn’t wasted any time when she’d arrived, and immediately launched into a thorough explanation of everything he knew about the supernatural - pacing around his room to hand Lydia stacks of papers, which she tried to flick through quickly enough to keep up. Although she wished he would take a little more time to breathe in between sentences, Lydia appreciated being spared the awkward conversation about why she wanted to know as badly as she did. Stiles just seemed to already understand that. In fact, he didn’t even seem surprised that she had called him. It was like he had been waiting for her to ask for this crash course all along.

Stiles, Lydia is glad to notice, becomes just as obsessed as she is with her current predicament. When she mentions it, his eyes actually light up, which until now, Lydia had thought was only an expression, and not something that could actually happen to someone being presented a new puzzle. “Oh my God,” he says, running to his bulletin board to clear a space for this new investigation, “you’re so right. So, there must be something about you, it’s gotta be connected.”

It happens so fast, Lydia isn’t sure how to react. “Wait, you believe me? You don’t think I’m just crazy?” Her voice comes out sounding a lot shakier than she’d intended, and Stiles turns around abruptly, brows scrunched together in concern.

“No, no, no, no – Lydia, I don’t – I never thought you were crazy. You know -this has been insane for everyone, I mean, my best friend has to fight the urge to maul me to death with his razor sharp claws every full moon. Your ex-boyfriend had a tail, an actual _tail,_ Lydia, and it could frigging paralyze people. The world is what’s crazy. We’re just caught up in it.”

Lydia’s heart skips a beat. She purses her lips together to stop the smile threatening to spread across her face, and oh God, now she’s blushing. She scrambles to hide behind some of the papers scattered all over her lap, because this is all just too embarrassing. The new Lydia Martin doesn’t need anyone’s validation, doesn’t need anyone to know how much it actually means to her to be taken seriously. Pretending to be looking for something on the page she’s holding, she says, “Okay…so where do we start?”

The corners of Stiles’s mouth are twitching like he’s fighting off a grin, so she knows that he saw her blush, and that he knows why. And yet, he doesn’t seem to be interested in doing anything about it. He just starts rambling about the different sources they should check. As if nothing happened. Okay, Lydia thinks, if he can be cool about it then she can try not to over analyze whether or not he has feelings for her. It’ll be easier this way.

They spend the rest of the afternoon hard at work, exhausting every lead and ruling out several supernatural creatures. Lydia is _very_ relieved to find out that she is not, in fact, a vampire, goblin, or the Loch Ness Monster (which Stiles had been hilariously serious about). Lydia would never say it out-loud, but there’s something really natural about hanging out with Stiles. Like something just clicks into place.

Stiles’s dad calls around six, which Lydia takes as her queue to go home. She’s looking for her shoes when he says, “Hey, Lydia, what kind of toppings do you want on your pizza? My dad’s gonna bring some home.”

Apparently, she’s staying for dinner.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The fifteen-year plan to make Lydia fall in love with him hadn’t originally involved her coming over to his house every day to pour over ancient Latin texts, but Stiles thought it was a nice addition. He’d embarrassed himself enough when it came to Lydia, but – finally - she was actually seeking him out. The plan might even be shortened back down to ten years, but he’d have to wait and see.

Stiles isn’t sure how it happened exactly, but they sort of fell into a routine after that first day. Almost every day, Lydia would show up on his doorstep, usually before noon. She would walk into his room like she owned the place, kick off her shoes by the door and flop onto Stiles bed with whatever book she was currently scouring for more information. They would usually spend about an hour catching each other up on all of the new theories they had thought of in the middle of the night or going over everything they had covered the day before. Then, eventually, she would announce that she was absolutely starving, drop whatever she was working on and saunter out to the jeep, not even looking to see if he was following. He always was, obviously. After they’d gotten food and, most likely, milkshakes - it was back to work until dinner, which Lydia stayed for most nights with Stiles and his dad.

Stiles had expected a few questions, but damn, Lydia wanted to know _everything._ Her questions had questions. She didn’t just want to know the rules of the supernatural, she wanted to understand why they worked. She wanted to know why Alphas have a different eye color than Betas, and why Mountain Ash worked when ash from other trees wouldn’t, and the frigging scientific names of every different type of wolfsbane and what made them different. Her biggest priority, though, was trying to figure out what she was. She was totally consumed by it. Stiles couldn’t blame her, although it was weird seeing someone else reach his usual level of obsession.

He only had the answers to about 10% of what she wanted to know, and those answers usually prompted even more questions, but Stiles didn’t mind. Lydia was, unsurprisingly, really cool when she wasn’t pretending to be an idiot. With no one around to impress or manipulate, her brain was like the Flash. On steroids. On one of those moving sidewalks they have at airports. It was a nice challenge, trying to keep up with her.

Even better, she didn’t seem to mind if he saw how much she cared about this stuff. She never once apologized for asking her 8 billion questions. She probably didn’t even realize how strange it was, the level of depth she wanted to go into on every topic.

It just was so nice to _finally_ have someone actually show interest in the mass of painstaking research he had done that, by the fifth day, he wasn’t even really thinking about the plan anymore.

It’s been two straight weeks of this, and Stiles can tell they are running out of leads to chase. The Beastiary didn’t even know what Lydia is, and Stiles isn’t sure where to go from there. He’d never tell Lydia that, though. His current plan is to keep distracting her with more and more supernatural crap, even if it isn’t remotely related, just to keep her from leaving. For the most part, it’s working, because Lydia is so fascinated by all of it, even the details that no one else could possibly give a shit about can take a couple of hours to cover.

Today, though, Stiles doesn’t see how it could possibly be more glaringly obvious that they’re getting nowhere. And unless he’s somehow overestimated Lydia’s intelligence, which doesn’t seem likely, she knows it too. And she’s about to walk out the door and look for answers somewhere else. Well, he thinks, they had a good run. He’d go back to just spending all day hanging out alone, playing video games while he waits for Scott to get off work so he can go to Scott’s house and play more video games. He’ll see her in September. At least now she probably won’t ignore him in the hallway.

She gets up to put her shoes back on, and they’d already made sandwiches for lunch so, yeah, this is it, she’s definitely giving up. _Be cool,_ he tells himself, _you knew this was gonna happen eventually._

“I want to go shopping.” She says. Stiles tries to hide the look of disappointment that he’s definitely wearing. But then, Lydia does something he never could have seen coming. She turns to face him, arms crossed impatiently, and says, “Well? Are you coming, or what?”

Stiles fights the urge to jump into the air, like actually, literally jump for joy like a damn cartoon character. Desperate not to seem too…well, desperate, he says, “What, so I’m like your substitute Allison this summer?”

Lydia tilts her head to the side, smiling mischievously, “Pretty much. I don’t have a lot of options, so you’ll have to do.”

“Wow, that might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“See? I really do have a soul. Seriously, though, can we go now?”

“Alright,” he says, laughing, “but I’m not painting your nails.”

 

They go to the mall, and shopping with Lydia turns out to be surprisingly fun. He ends up carrying all of the bags, and she takes exceedingly long to try everything on, but she also laughs at all of his dumb jokes and makes a game of finding the ugliest items in every store they visit. In one store, she makes him try on a vest covered in fake fur, telling him he should get it to match Scott on full moons, “you know, for emotional support.”

 

After that, the routine changes a little. They still spend a lot of their time together trying to get some research done, but each day they spend more and more time doing normal things, just for fun. This is a vast improvement on how Stiles has spent most of his free time since Peter bit his best friend, which is mostly just trying not to die. It’s weird, pretending to be a normal teenager. Sometimes they just hang out in Stiles’s room for hours, talking about completely normal, non-supernatural stuff. Sometime in July, Stiles decides to pretty much throw the 15-year plan out the window. There hadn’t been much in it past the point of her actually acknowledging his existence, anyway.

Scott, who had so _conveniently_ been busy when they could have used his help with research, starts joining them when he’s not working at the Clinic. He does this really great thing where he tells them he won’t use his wolf powers to cheat at laser tag and then definitely does, and he somehow manages not to ask 10,000 questions about Allison when Lydia is around, which Stiles is very proud of.

One night after Lydia goes home, Scott asks, “Dude, for the hundredth time, why haven’t you just asked her out?”

Stiles opens his mouth to say some positive bullshit thing like “It’s all part of the plan, Scott, don’t rush the plan!” but he can’t quite get the words out. A weird, dying-cat-like sound comes out instead. Scott just raises his eyebrows, waiting patiently.

“Okay, I don’t know. I just – It’s like…we have a good thing going here, I guess. I don’t want to ruin our friendship, okay?”

Scott rolls his eyes at the answer. “Okay, but _dude_. C’mon, isn’t it worth it? This is Lydia. The girl you’ve been in love with since we were eight.”

“Yeah, and you know what? She knows I’ve been in love with her since I was eight, too. She’s not interested, okay? If she was, she would have done something by now.”

“Something like…oh, I don’t know, coming over to your house everyday for no reason, and hanging out with you and your dad, and flirting with you, like nonstop?”

“Scott what, I mean – _flirting?_ That’s just – there’s no – you don’t –“ Stiles can feel his face twitching uncomfortably as he scrambles to make a normal expression and come up with a coherent sentence. “She’s just here to do research, Scott, okay? This purely…just….academic…and scientific…research. That’s it.”

“ _Stiles_. When is the last time the two of you did any research?”

Stiles runs through the past week in his head, ready to show Scott how completely stupid this is because obviously he’s wrong – but he can’t remember the last time they did anything supernatural related. Yesterday was pizza and sitcom reruns, the day before was bowling, before that was an epic air hockey tournament at the arcade. Movies, hiking, shopping, the beach – _shit._ Stiles seriously can’t think of the last time they’d done something that _wasn’t_ normal. Or even what they had been working on.

Scott’s making that stupid face he makes when he thinks he’s won – it’s somehow good-natured and also totally gloat-y at the same time and it’s infuriating.

Whatever, Stiles thinks. He knows he’s right, Scott just doesn’t understand. There’s something strangely delicate about the situation with Lydia, and going back to openly pining for her would just ruin the whole thing. If she actually was interested in him, she’d have to do something more solid than just insulting his parking and drinking all the diet soda in the house. But she wasn’t interested. And okay, fine – Stiles definitely _was_ still interested, but that didn’t really matter.

Besides, it wasn’t all bad – it was definitely a huge improvement on how things had been last year, when she hadn’t even known who he was. And honestly, he’d never let Lydia hear him say it, but she really was a great friend. She might be closed off to most people, but shit, when she decided to care about someone, she _really_ cared _._ Like, brings your dad churros because she drove past the stand on the way there and remembered that he likes them, wants to look at all your old baby pictures, actually listens to your favorite songs, and helps you figure out how to hair gel without judging you level of cares. And for whatever reason, she’s decided to care about Stiles. So yeah, it was worth not ruining over a crush.

 

A few days later, Stiles is proven right when Lydia ditches him and Scott to go on a date. She just stands up, right in the middle of the underwater level of Super Mario when they need her most, and announces that she has to go get ready for her date. Just like that. No further explanation. It feels like a punch to the gut, watching her leave. Scott, because he’s Scott, doesn’t try to make Stiles talk about it, and doesn’t waste any time in trying to distract him by starting the game again and acting really into it. It doesn’t work, but Stiles appreciates the attempt anyway.

Over the next few days, Lydia doesn’t say anything about this guy that she went out with, but she waits until he calls her three times before she answers, so she’s obviously playing hard to get. Texbook Lydia Martin™. Two weeks later, she misses board game night to go on another date, and Stiles has a suspicion that it’s a different guy, from her completely obvious change in texting patterns. Okay, so maybe Stiles is the only one that notices that, but whatever, it still stands.

And yeah, on one hand, it’s nice to see her so confident again, out there playing the field, or whatever. Classic Lydia Martin, holding some poor bastard’s heart in the palm of her hand. After everything with Jackson and Peter and being the town nut job, it’s impressive. It makes Stiles feel kind of good, in a weird way – seeing her back to just going after what she wants without hesitation. Sports movie levels of inspirational.

But mostly, it just sucks. Like, 1% inspirational and 99% sucks. No matter how many times he tells himself he doesn’t care anymore, and even though he hasn’t actually tried to make a move on Lydia in a long time, he still feels rejected. He knows it’s not fair of him to feel that way, and that he’ll just have to get over it if he wants to keep this friendship from imploding, but it still sucks.

For the first time in his life, he’s actually disappointed to be right about something.

 

 

* * *

 

 

By the middle of August, Lydia realizes she has nothing to worry about with Stiles. He couldn’t possibly still think they would make a good match, because Lydia doesn’t think there have ever been two people who were more infuriating to each other. Stiles, she learns, loves to argue. He’ll fight about anything – music, how to eat Oreos, exactly what animal a particular cloud looks like - he never shuts up. There are very few things he doesn’t have a strong opinion about, and Lydia finds herself at odds with him on almost every single one. He also never gets tired of it, Lydia thinks as they enter hour 3 of a very heated debate about whether or not ghosts exist. (Lydia knows they don’t, but Stiles continues to point out that a year ago, he would have said the same thing about werewolves.)

The fight is winding down now though, finally, as Stiles rakes his fingers through his hair because he’s running out of logical points (a new habit, Lydia notices, now that he actually has hair long enough to mess up). This is the sign that he’s just about defeated. Soon he’ll jump up from the chair at his desk and find some way to change the subject. He’ll conveniently realize something about the supernatural that they hadn’t thought of before. Lydia smiles, barely refraining from a fist pump, which is fortunate because Lydia Martin obviously doesn’t care whether or not she’s won such a petty argument. (In her head, she adds another point under her name on the scoreboard of Stiles vs. Lydia.) Even though most of their arguments – and they’ve had a _lot_ at this point – can’t actually be settled, it’s the unspoken rule that whoever gives up and changes the subject first loses.

And that’s exactly what Stiles does. “Damn, you’re stubborn.” He says, standing up to wander over to his bookshelf, “Alright. You wore me down, Martin. Want to watch a movie?”

Lydia laughs, moving to sit up on Stiles’ bed. “That depends, if you say you want to watch Star Wars I think I have to go home and wash my hair. It’s really important. Can’t reschedule.”

Stiles shoots her look Lydia can only describe as exasperated – probably recalling the spectacular fight they had had a few weeks ago when she’d claimed to dislike Star Wars. That had been the most angry she had ever seen him. Lydia actually quite likes the movies, and had started the argument mostly as a joke, but the intense amount of offense Stiles took to the statement was so much more entertaining than she had been expecting, she’d decided to keep it up for a while. So, alright, Lydia will admit – maybe Stiles isn’t the only one that likes arguing.

“Fiiiiiine. What’s your favorite movie, then?”

“Hmmmm…the Notebook.”

“Okay.”

“…Okay? Okay what?” Lydia asks, taken aback. Of all things to be agreeable about, he picks this? It makes no sense.

“Uhh, okay, we can watch it? You sure you have a genius level IQ? I’m starting to have doubts.”

“What, like you actually want to watch the Notebook?”

“Sure, I don’t mind it. I’m your substitute Allison, right? I’m guessing my duties include chick flicks. And my - uh…my mom actually really liked that movie. I think we have it downstairs somewhere.”

“Oh. Okay.”

 

Movie nights usually end up being the longest stretches the two of them go without arguing – after the obligatory cage match about which movie to watch, of course. For the most part, they tend to agree on what aspects of the movie are okay to make fun of, so even though the talking never really stops, at least they’re usually on the same side, like they’re arguing with the movie instead of each other. Lydia settles into her usual spot on the couch, Stiles makes popcorn, and it’s silently agreed that all biting remarks (towards each other, at least) will be set aside for the next 124 minutes.

As the movie starts, Lydia realizes she hasn’t watched it since before everything changed. It’s unbelievable, how strange her life has become. That having three friends, _total_ (one of whom can grow claws and make his eyes glow at will), listening to Stiles Stilinski babble on and on about police codes and rules about the number three, and passing up sleep to translate Latin texts about monsters have all become the new normal for Lydia. Never, in a million years, would she have guessed that she would spend the entire summer before junior year fighting with a boy about stupid things like the correct way to make nachos.

During the movie, Lydia definitely does _not_ notice that Noah and Allie also spend a lot of their time fighting. She certainly doesn’t see the similarities between the way Stiles looks at Lydia when she insults Star Wars and the look on Ryan Gosling’s face. She couldn’t possibly be feeling slightly nervous just because she’s sitting as close to Stiles as she is. There must be some other, more logical reason for her rise in heart rate. (There are plenty of scientific reasons this could be happening.) They are nothing like the couple in her favorite movie. Not even close. Lydia won’t even entertain the thought. That would just be ridiculous.


	2. Parallel Lines

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! 
> 
> And thank you so so so much to everyone that commented or left kudos on the first chapter! I'm blown away. (Particularly Fernanda (lydiasavedme on tumblr) who was so hype for the second chapter that it got me really hype to write the second chapter! Thanks girl.)  
> And as always thanks Marissa (gorgeoussimplehousecat on tumblr) for saying the best things about this and letting me bitch about my life for literally ten years and never complaining.
> 
> Any comments, kudos, or bookmarks are HUGELY appreciated, btw. Thanks so much!
> 
> * * *

Junior year is already off to a spectacularly terrible start. Sure, things have been on a general downward slope since Scott got himself turned into a werewolf, but this is still a record amount of shitty things to happen in one day, right? If the random bird attacks, someone trying to kidnap Isaac, and the threat of a frigging Alpha Pack – which, seriously, how is that a thing – are any indication of how this year is going to go, Stiles doesn’t want any part of it.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of the crap that Stiles can currently feel like a weight settling down on his chest. Animals acting weird, Boyd and Erica, and oh, yeah, an Alpha Pack. As in a pack – a whole _pack_ – of Alphas. Alphas being basically just angrier, more bloodthirsty, supercharged werewolves. A pack of them - who have, apparently, been in town all summer. Stiles finds this information a little distressing.

Scott tells Stiles not to worry, that Derek’s probably got it covered and they need to focus on school. Please, easy for Scott to say. He’s got claws and super strength for when this shit hits the fan. But Stiles? He’s got, what, Scott’s mom’s baseball bat? Telling Stiles not to worry…it’s ridiculous. There’s too much that needs to be worried about. Someone’s gotta do it. 

He spends the entire drive home from Derek’s trying, unsuccessfully, to turn his brain off. He taps his fingers rapidly against the steering wheel, hoping to release a little bit of this nervous energy, but it doesn’t really work. He wonders if it would be possible to actually physically suffocate if enough weird stuff happened all at once, because every time he remembers something else he should be nervous about, whatever is clutching at his lungs gets a little tighter. He makes a mental note to ask Lydia about it later. She’ll probably say he’s being stupid.

Now that he’s reunited with his old friend - crushing anxiety - he fully appreciates how nice it had been to be free of it all summer. It’s like when you get a cold and realize you should have been happier about being able to breathe when you weren’t sick, except that the reason Stiles can’t breathe is slightly different.

Of course, Stiles realizes now that it’s not because Beacon Hills was _actually_ a safe place this summer; oh no, that’s _way_ too much to ask. Derek was just hiding everything from them. Didn’t want them to worry about it. For once, Stiles thinks, Derek’s used his tendency to keep secrets to actually help other people. How sweet. Stiles has a fleeting thought of sending Derek an Edible Arrangement to thank him for the four months of peace.

Imagining Derek’s face opening the door to a bunch of melons cut to look like flowers almost makes Stiles feel better somehow.

“Okay Stiles,” he says, catching his eyes in the rearview mirror, “you’re okay.” 

He’s still hoping that if he says it enough, one of these times he’ll believe it.

As he pulls into his driveway, Stiles decides that he should really just focus all his energy on worrying about Scott. Stiles already knew that it would be hard for Scott to be around Allison again, and then on top of that he has to get beaten up and burned all in the same day? Was that really necessary? Poor guy, wastes his whole summer reading a bunch of really boring books and trying to become an even better person, and this is the reward he gets. Really not cool, Universe.

Later that night, as Stiles sits at his desk, attempting to do homework but really just researching more unusual animal incidents, his phone goes off.

 “Stiles! I’m turning 17 this week, I’m gonna have a party at my house this weekend! You should come!”

The text is from Heather, as in Heather from another life where Stiles was a little kid and everything was normal. At first, Stiles isn’t sure how to respond. The idea of spending the whole night getting drunk at some party seems too bizarre. Did Stiles mention that there’s an Alpha Pack in town somewhere? They really don’t have time for anything but sheer panic, right?

Stiles is about to reply with a half-baked excuse, when he remembers the look on Scott’s face earlier that day, as he was saying that seeing Allison again felt like an open wound. Ah, man. Stiles feels his best friend spidey-senses tingling. Scott really needs something good to happen, and he needs to get over Allison. And what better way to get over a girl than to meet a bunch of new girls that go to a different school and definitely don’t remember Scott’s awkward phase?

This party might just be exactly what they need right now.

Stiles texts back, “Awesome! I’m in. You remember Scott, right? Is it cool if he comes too?”

Heather replies, “Haha of course! Scott’s cool. As long as you still have some time for the birthday girl :)” 

Whoa, what the fuck, a smiley face? Stiles can feel his heart rate going up. Is Heather…flirting with him? They’ve taken _bubble baths_ together as children, isn’t that something way to embarrassing to overcome and flirt with someone after?

Stiles thinks back to the last time he saw her, when they ran into each other at the grocery store earlier in the summer – and oh my god she touched his arm that day. She laughed at his dumb joke and reached out and touched his arm. _Holy shit._  

Not that Stiles is complaining – Heather is incredibly pretty, and funny, and smart – or at least Stiles is pretty sure she is. _There’s no way she’s as smart as Lydia, though…_ a voice says in the back of his head. Stiles feels something like anger surging up in his throat at that thought. Lydia’s been dating whoever for the past couple of weeks, but Stiles can’t even get a smiley face in a text from another girl and he’s upset about Lydia? No, he thinks, not anymore. Time to move on, for real. As he replies to Heather with something that he hopes is more flirtatious than awkward, he feels good about the decision. This weekend, no Allison, no Lydia.

He’s hoping he’ll finally be able to get it into his head that the two of them will only ever be friends.

 

* * *

 

Lydia knows the physical symptoms of going into shock. A weak and rapid pulse; dilated pupils; weakness; thirst; nausea and vomiting; shallow breathing. But what she can’t explain is this disconnect between her brain making a rational, logical, decision (to call Allison) and her fingers doing something completely different (calling Stiles). It isn’t until after she hangs up the phone and is alone, waiting for him, that it hits Lydia that calling Stiles made no sense at all. If Lydia had the time later, perhaps she would try to figure out why she’d done it. She’d realize that she had actually scrolled _past_ both Allison and Scott to get down to the “St” names in her contact list, and maybe she’d try to figure out what could have possibly caused that.

At the moment, however, Lydia has some much more pressing things to think about. (Namely, a bleeding corpse currently situated three feet above her.)       

Lydia certainly didn’t sign up for this tonight. She just wanted to run to the store to grab some more Advil for her migraine (a migraine that may or may not include some strange whispering voices in her head – she isn’t about to tell anyone about that part of it). Lydia isn’t sure how she even ended up at the pool. She remembers the entire drive over, which is comforting, but she doesn’t remember making the decision to go in the complete opposite direction of where she actually needed to be.       

After she found the body, everything seemed to happen really fast. She dialed 911, feeling her heartbeat pounding in her ears, trying to keep her voice even as she recited the address. After that, it’s a miracle she was even able to find Stiles’s number in her phone, her hands were shaking so badly. He answered on the second ring, “Lydia? Lydia, hey, you okay?” Somehow, he was already in a panic. Like he just knew. Lydia absentmindedly wondered if she’d ever called him for anything normal, any time everything was fine and she just wanted to chat.

“Umm...” she says, mashing her lips together and trying to breathe at a normal pace, “I...uhh…I kind of found a dead body.”

“A dead – what the – like a _dead_ body? Oh my god, what does it look like? Is it like…how –“

“Stiles! I’m freaking out, can you focus?!”

“Oh, shit, sorry – yeah, Lydia, I’m already in the car, where are you?”

Lydia let out a breath she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding. Knowing he was on the way felt like a warm blanket being wrapped around her shoulders. “I’m at the pool…he’s uh…he’s in the lifeguard tower.”

 “Okay, I’m on my way. Are you okay? Wait – isn’t the pool closed? Why were you at the pool?”

“I’m… I’m fine, I’m…I don’t know, I just came here and I thought someone was in the water, and then it wasn’t a real person, and then I looked up and…and…” Lydia swallowed hard. She wanted to keep talking, wanted to be cool and collected and explain everything logically, but she couldn’t seem to get the words out. (Just a symptom of anxiety – the feeling that one’s throat is actually closing up.)

“Okay, Lydia it’s okay, just…just don’t look at him, alright?”

Don’t look at him? Lydia wanted to laugh out loud. For a moment, she could breathe normally again. “No, Stiles, please,” she said thickly, “I _really_ want to look at the disgusting dead body.”

“Okay, trying to help here, you know.” Lydia could hear the jeep screeching in the background – Stiles must have been turning left.

 “Just hurry up.” 

“Lydia, I’m almost there, okay? I’ll see you in a minute.”

The line went dead before Lydia could ask him to stay on the phone with her, which was somehow both a relief (because honestly, how embarrassing) and infuriating. (What, she was supposed to just stand there quietly, alone with a dead person, and wait for him to show up?)

It takes him another minute and 47 seconds to get there, not that Lydia was counting, although it did feel like a very _long_ minute and 47 seconds. She spends the time standing as far away from the pool as she can get, tries to regulate her breathing and think about literally anything other than what happened the last time she did things like driving places without thinking about it. Of course, when she squeezes her eyes shut she sees Peter Hale’s burnt up face anyway. She wonders if he’ll ever stop haunting her.

As she hears the familiar lurch of the Jeep’s brakes, she feels some of the tension melt out of her shoulders. This makes no sense of course. Stiles doesn’t calm things down, he agitates them; with the flailing limbs and the mouth that’s always saying things too fast and too loud and most likely without really thinking them through. Yep, there he goes, jumping out of the car so fast Lydia isn’t sure how he even had time to put it in park. In a weird way, though, it’s relaxing. Like Stiles is so nervous he’s actually soaking up some the anxiety out of the air. Lydia might feel like it’s impossible to breathe because she’s trembling so much, but she knows that somehow, she’ll still be a little more put together than Stiles. That might be terrible to think, but it makes Lydia feel moderately better anyway.

He runs toward her, shouting her name and asking if she’s okay. And this is what stops the hysterics clawing around in her chest, making her want to scream. This, the idiot that probably broke several traffic laws to get here before the police, is the main difference between now and everything that happened last year. Because even if this does mean something bad is happening – at least she won’t be alone.

 

* * *

 

 

“Well, your interrogatory expression is getting on my nerves. The answer is, I have no clue how I ended up finding that body. I didn't even know where I was until I got out of the car.”

“Yeah, but the last time something like this happened...”

“I know. Derek's Uncle.”

“Peter.”

Now, Stiles thinks, would be an excellent time to be able to turn his brain off. Because right now, it’s at maximum capacity.

His mind is spinning with possible reasons someone would want to control Lydia into finding a dead body, not to mention who it could be and if it relates to any of the other weird stuff going on. It’s overwhelming to the point that Stiles is about to start talking through it out loud. He actually opens his mouth to try to pose the question of whether or not it’s possible Lydia could have been responsible for the murder somehow, when he catches Lydia trying to discreetly wipe a tear under her eye. She looks terrified.

Okay, so maybe sharing theories that she might be a murderer isn’t a great idea right now. Shut up, Stiles.

He takes a seat on the edge of the bed next to her, struggling to put together a string of words that won’t make the whole thing even worse. Fortunately, Lydia speaks first.

“What if…what if it’s happening again?” Her voice is soft, as if saying it too loudly will make it true. Her hands are shaking a little bit as she twists her fingers together. Suddenly, Stiles realizes he doesn’t know much about what was happening to her last year. She never wanted to talk about it and none of them ever wanted to ask. But this fear that looks so out of place in Lydia’s eyes…it’s not the kind of fear Stiles is so used to, the fear of what’s going to happen. It’s more like she’s remembering what already did.

“Lydia,” he begins slowly, “what was it like, last time?”

Lydia lets out a shaky breath, “I don’t know… I would see things mostly. Things that weren’t there.” She meets Stiles’s eyes, probably hoping he’ll say something so she can stop talking about it. He won’t. He just raises his eyebrows, waiting patiently.

“I saw…Peter. Everywhere.” She continues, now looking at the floor, “I saw him the way he looked in high school, in my backyard, and at school. And then when I realized who he was, I saw him all the time. All burned up, or decomposing and covered in dirt. He would just show up, everywhere. In class, in my house. Whispering in my ear when I woke up in the middle of the night. I couldn’t get away from him. It was just like a nightmare. Only I could never wake up from it.”

Stiles feels a guilty ache in his stomach, that he let all of this happen to her. That he hadn’t paid attention. A few stray tears fall from her eyes and Lydia reaches up to brush them away. Stiles can’t help but notice that she still looks totally gorgeous, even though he’s not allowed to think that kind of thing anymore.

In all honesty, Stiles is too rational to believe that Lydia could have found that body purely by coincidence. His brain is still in a frenzy, still trying to figure out how it could all be connected. But Lydia crying like this…he feels desperate to make up for everything. He couldn’t help her then, but maybe he can fix things now.

Resolved, his mouth jumps into action, working faster than his brain, “Okay, well, see? I definitely saw that body, Lydia, it was so disgusting I don’t think I’ll ever _un_ -see it. So that’s good, right? No hallucinations tonight. It’s not the same. What else?

Lydia’s mouth presses into a smile so small it’s barely perceptible, but it’s definitely still a smile. She’s catching on.

“Um, okay - sometimes I would just kind of wake up and I would be in a different place, in the middle of doing something. I mean…I couldn’t remember how I got there or what I had been doing before, it was like I blinked and suddenly I was somewhere else. There was a lot of missing time.”

“Is that what tonight felt like?”

“No, I, uh…I remember the whole drive to the pool. It’s just not where I thought I was going.”

“Okay, this is great, isn’t it? This was totally different. And hey,” he nudges her shoulder with his own so she’ll look up at him again, “remember the rule about threes?”

“You and that rule – “

“Something happening once is nothing. Even if you find another dead body, then that’s just a coincidence. You’d have to find another _two dead bodies_ for this to be a pattern. Two whole bodies – Lydia! Two gross, rotting, bloat –“

“Okay!” Lydia actually laughs a little, “I get the picture. Two bodies.”

“Yeah, see? Two more bodies, then we’ll freak out about it.”  

Lydia nods at him as he talks, a smile spreading on her face. He can just see the gears in her mind turning, finding more differences, convincing herself. It’s working. She looks slightly less worried. Good, Stiles thinks. He’s got the worrying covered for the both of them.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Lydia can’t sleep.

It’s not for lack of trying. Even if she could find a way to rest her head on the back of this bus seat that didn’t feel like it was going to cause a permanent neck damage, she can’t close her eyes without seeing that face. It must have been the Darach, she knows now, because what else could it have been? (It certainly looked creepy enough to fit the bill, in Lydia’s opinion. 

Whatever it was, it was disgusting. And it’s still seared onto the back of Lydia’s eyelids, leaving her too on edge to sleep.

Having given up on trying to find a comfortable position to fall asleep in, she takes a look around the bus. None of her friends seem to be having the same problem. Allison, in the seat right next to her, is leaning her head against the window, looking more peaceful than Lydia’s seen her look in weeks. Scott, on the other side of the bus, had passed out pretty much the second they’d all sat down. And Stiles, sitting next to Lydia across the aisle, is unsurprisingly the least graceful looking of the three. His head is back so far it’s twisting his neck at what can’t possibly be a comfortable angle and his mouth is hanging open. He may or may not be snoring a little bit.

Lydia smiles to herself at the sight of him like this, and then lets her eyes slide past him to check out the window, one more time. Just to make sure nothing’s out there. Again. She’s exhausted, but someone needs to make sure no one’s sneaking up on the three sleeping beauties, here.

She leans her head back to stare at the grey ceiling of the bus, going through the new Thermodynamics terms in her head, chastising herself for leaving the book in Allison’s car.

Suddenly, she’s startled by a movement to her right. She turns quickly, almost expecting to see the Darach looming over her, but it’s just Stiles, having just woken up very abruptly. He’s currently staring at Scott and breathing a little too rapidly, like someone waking up from a nightmare.

“Hey.” Lydia whispers, “You okay?”

Stiles jumps. He must not have realized someone else was awake. “Oh, uh…hey,” he whispers, leaning back into his seat. “I’m fine…just, uhh…”

“Checking on Scott?”

Stiles presses his lips together sadly before shooting a quick glance back at his best friend. He nods. Lydia responds with a small, sympathetic smile. “It’s been a long night.” She whispers.

Stiles sighs, leaning his head back on the seat. Lydia can’t imagine how awful he must have felt, watching Scott holding that flare. She loves Scott too, obviously, and if it had been Allison, Lydia’s sure she would have been devastated as well, but Scott and Stiles…they literally grew up together. Lydia doesn’t really have anyone in her life like that. And there’s something so extreme about how Stiles clings to the people around him, Lydia’s noticing. The three of them on this bus might be his only friends, but he would (literally) be willing to set himself on fire if it meant saving them.

It occurs to her, all of the sudden, that he’s probably this way because of what happened to his mom. He really knows what it’s like to lose someone – Lydia can’t blame him for being so desperate to keep it from happening again.

And now, as she sees him staring straight ahead, still upset from coming so close to losing his best friend, she feels her heart breaking a little bit for him. 

“Hey,” she says softly, “it’s gonna be okay.” She instinctively reaches across the divide for his hand, not really caring about the fact that holding hands with Stiles Stilinski should probably feel really awkward. Stiles doesn’t seem to care either. Maybe they’re both just too tired.

He squeezes her fingers and gives her a strained smile. After a moment, his brows scrunch together in realization. “What are you doing awake? Are you okay?”

Lydia sighs, and turns to look straight ahead again without letting go of his hand.

“I just…I can’t sleep.” She hopes that will be a satisfactory answer to his question. She doesn’t want to talk about it, what she saw. She knows it’s a long shot, because Stiles will probably never want to shut up about it, but somehow, he lets it go. He just rubs her knuckles with his thumb and doesn’t say anything.

Eager to change the subject anyway, Lydia looks back at Allison fast asleep on her left. “Look at these two,” she whispers to Stiles. “They’re just…out.”

Stiles lets a quiet laugh slip out. “Yeah, you know, all the heroics must be pretty exhausting.”

“They don’t look so badass in their sleep, do they?”

 “Oh yeah, Scott’s definitely drooling. It’s majestic.”

Lydia starts laughing too. “He’s the hero we deserve.”

They go silent for a while, looking at their friends. “You know,” Lydia starts, “tonight we saved them. What a twist.”

Stiles smirks. “Yeah…yeah I guess we did.”

By some miracle, Lydia feels like she might actually be calm enough to fall asleep. She drifts off, only vaguely aware of the fact that her hand is still wrapped up with Stiles’s in the middle of the aisle.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Now, what must be a lifetime later (although it’s really only been a few days), Lydia would give anything to feel Stiles’s hand in hers again. Or to see Scott smile, or hear Allison’s laugh. Lydia would gladly reach into her own chest and rip out her heart if it meant the three of them would wake up (and her heart was the problem here, really).

She paces back and forth in front of them, searching each tub desperately for any sign of movement. But her friends, the three people she quite possibly cares about most in the world, remain completely still, frozen under the water.

For the first time, Lydia is really aware of how far her friends have really rooted themselves in her soul. Lydia Martin wasn’t supposed to depend on anyone, but those three… Somehow they had wormed their way into her skin, settling into her bone marrow. Suddenly, she realizes she doesn’t know who she’d be without them.

“A few seconds” Deaton had said. They were only supposed to be dead for a few seconds. After half an hour, Lydia starts to feel a terror that gets stronger and stronger with every minute that passes. Every time she checks the clock, Lydia thinks she’s reached the highest level of fear a human is capable of experiencing. She thinks there’s unquestionably no way she can feel any more miserable than she already does, and yet, somehow, the ache in her stomach finds a way.

No one has spoken in almost two hours. There’s nothing to say. And Lydia’s pretty sure if she tries talking, all she’ll be able to do is scream. It’s ironic that she’d started this morning feeling so strong – wearing her ligature marks to school like a badge of honor. Right now, she doesn’t feel capable of surviving anything.

In hour six, Lydia finally hits a plateau. She resigns herself to sitting in a corner, staring vacantly at a wall and trying not to think about the fact that her only friends are likely lying dead three feet from her (but of course, she can’t seem to think about anything else).

By hour nine, Isaac can’t even stand to be in the room anymore. He continues his third of the silent vigil in the waiting room. Lydia watches him walk out, trying not to imagine how he’d look walking into Scott’s empty house. She understands now, how Stiles must have felt as he stepped into the puddle of gasoline in that motel parking lot. She’d let this whole town burn to the ground if it would warm them up.

Sometime during hour ten, Deaton brings the three of them takeout. Lydia can’t seem to think about anything but all of the nights spent at Allison’s house, where they would pick up food from this same Chinese restaurant in the middle of the night. She can see Allison laughing, sitting cross-legged on her bed, chopsticks in hand. Lydia’s food turns to dust in her mouth.

Somewhere in hour thirteen (or is it fourteen?) Lydia’s hands start to shake. Stiles is the one who’s always shaking, she thinks. It’s so _wrong_ to see him this way. Too still. Stiles should always be moving. Always talking excitedly and waving his hands around. She’d give anything to see him jerk awake and burst out of that tub, all spastic and ungraceful.

Hell, at the moment, Lydia would settle for just being able to stop thinking about how his lips had felt on hers earlier that day. The whole thing is already complicated and impossible to really figure out, but now it actually physically hurts to remember it. She tells herself sternly that it didn’t really mean anything – just a friend trying to help. Whatever she thought she might have felt, it was just chemicals. Dopamine and endorphins released in the brain because of signals from her lips. It didn’t mean anything – but she can’t stop thinking about it anyway. She actually catches herself brushing her fingertips back and forth across her lips before she decides to just sit on her hands until hour fifteen.

Hour fifteen might be the worst one of all, Lydia thinks. (She tries not to remind herself of the fact that she’d also felt that way about hours 1 – 14.) She leans back against the wall, staring at the ceiling to avoid staring at her friends anymore. She wonders numbly when Deaton will decide to call it. When they’ll give up and accept that they’ve murdered Lydia’s three favorite people on the planet. _Death doesn’t happen to you, Lydia_. She tries to picture how the rest of her life will look without them, but there’s just nothing. She reaches up to brush a stray hair off her cheek, and is surprised to find tears there. Apparently, she's been crying. She wipes her face with her palm, feeling absolutely empty.

And that’s when it happens – the sudden sensation that her heart is literally trying to escape from her chest.

It’s an uncomfortable feeling, this tension in her ribcage. Like a string is tied around her heart, and someone is pulling on the other end. She ignores it for a while, continuing to stare at the ceiling in a daze. She thinks it’s probably some “Banshee” thing – Deaton hadn’t been very specific in explaining it to her earlier that day (surprise, surprise). Maybe her friends really are dead and the reason her heart feels like it’s being pulled towards the tubs is that it wants to lead her to find their bodies.

The pull gets more and more violent until Lydia starts to ignore logic and concludes that her heart must be close to actually bursting out of her side. All she can hear is her blood pounding in her ears, and suddenly, it’s all too horrible. She can’t stand it, being in this room. Her heartbeat is deafening, all she wants to do is run out of the building to get away from it.

But of course, she can’t run. This string is too tight – it would never let her go.

She clamps her eyes shut, hysterically trying to believe that her friends will wake up any second now. She imagines them rising up out of the water over and over, Allison and Scott and Stiles (and Stiles and Stiles and Stiles). She’s screaming at them in her head, begging them to wake up, _please_ just wake up.   

And then, _finally_ , she hears the splash of water hitting the floor to her left, and she feels like she can breathe again.

           

 

* * *

 

 

Stiles is pretty sure he’ll never feel completely calm again. But this, sitting at the McCall’s kitchen table, with Scott right next to him stuffing his face, and Melissa cleaning out the cut on his forehead, and his father in the kitchen making coffee for everyone, this is probably as close as he’ll get.

In the past week he’d come so close to losing all of them, but somehow, unbelievably, everyone made it out okay. Stiles will probably be able to get more than two hours of sleep tonight, what a ridiculous thought.

They stay up really late that night, eating and talking and basically just celebrating being alive and not tied up in a creepy underground cellar. At three in the morning, Melissa all but orders everyone to bed. Stiles and his dad walk out the door together, and as they reach their cars, Stiles’s dad claps a hand on his shoulder and gives him one of his patented-proud-dad-smiles that Stiles had seriously been afraid he’d never see again.

As Stiles sits in his jeep in the driveway, waiting for his dad to back out behind him, his phone starts to ring.

“Lydia, hey!”

“Well, you certainly sound chipper. Shouldn’t you already be freaking about something new that might be trying to kill all of us?”

“Oh, no, that’s not on the schedule until tomorrow. Tonight I’m too booked up with just being happy that everyone’s alive.”

“Same.” Lydia says, laughing, “So you’re okay, then?”

“Is that what this is? Is Lydia Martin calling just to check on me?”

“Please, Stiles. As if.”

“So you’re calling me at three in the morning because…?”

The other end of the line is silent for a long time. “You were dead, Stiles. All of you were dead.” All of the levity is gone from her voice. Stiles feels his heart drop down to his stomach.

“Lydia, I’m fine, it was just –“     

“No, Stiles I know. I’m okay, really. I just…for a while last night I really didn’t think any of you were gonna wake up, and…well, I guess I just wanted to say thanks. For coming back, I mean.”

Stiles throat feels very tight all of the sudden. “Oh…” he says, “uhh, yeah. Thanks for waiting for me.”

A weird, tense silence settles over them.

“Well –“

“Anyway – “

They both speak at the same time, and if Stiles thought things couldn’t get any more awkward than the silence, he was wrong.

“Uhh, I should –“

“Yeah, I need to get home it’s –“

“Okay, yeah, so I’ll see you at school tomorrow?”

“Uhh, yeah. Yeah. Goodnight, Lydia.”

“Goodnight, Stiles.”      

Stiles stays in park for another minute, stunned. Before he can shake himself out of it enough to actually leave, Scott scares the shit out of him by opening the passenger side door and climbing into the Jeep.

“So, on a scale of 1 to 10, how in love with Lydia would you say you are?”

“Scott, what are you – oh my god were you listening to that?”

“Of course I was, can you blame me?”

“Okay, no. But all supernatural eavesdropping aside, I don’t love Lydia, okay? That’s crazy.”

An annoying, knowing grin starts spreading across Scott’s face. “ _Sure,_ you don’t. And she _definitely_ doesn’t have any feelings for you either.”

“I don’t, though. And neither does she! She’s still with Aiden, and what happened today was just – it didn’t mean anything.“

“Today? What happened today?”

“Oh…Oh my god I never got a chance to tell you. So…Lydia – kind of - kissed me today. Well, I guess technically it was yesterday. At school, before we went to Deaton’s.”

Scott is looking more like an excited puppy than usual, but he’s totally speechless, so Stiles continues, “Look, it didn’t mean anything though. I was having a panic attack and she was just trying to calm me down.” 

“Stiles you’re kidding.”

“Nope, not kidding, at all actually. It didn’t mean anything.”

“So the only thing Lydia could think to do to calm you down was _kiss you?_ ”

“Yeah.”

“And that makes total sense.”

“…yeah.”

“Totally platonic.”

“Yep.”

Scott lets out a low whistle, “Man, you are so in love with her and you don’t even –“

“I’m not in love with her! Okay? Just, go. Go, go get your beauty sleep. Leave me alone.”

Scott just laughs as he gets out of the Jeep. “Okay but Stiles, you know I can hear your heartbeat right? And you’re totally lying.”

“Oh my god, can you stop it with the werewolf lie detector?” Stiles hollers as the Jeep’s door closes. “It’s unfair!”

 

Is Stiles in love with Lydia? Absolutely not. 

Does it feel like someone is physically ripping his heart out, knowing she’d been in pain, waiting for him? Of course.

But those things were completely unrelated.

 


	3. Average Rate of Change

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading! As always, comments, kudos and bookmarks mean the world to me, really. Feel free to come chat with me on tumblr as well! (mrtinsky)

Stiles manages to hold it together for a long time. Longer than he’d really expected to, honestly. He makes it through the planning session on what they’ll say about Barrow and Kira, the entire interview with FBI Agent Asshat, and he actually drives for about five minutes in the direction of Lydia’s house before the panic attack really starts to set in.

For a minute there he really thought he was in the clear, as he watched Lydia climb up into the jeep, clicking the seatbelt into place over the bulldog on her sweater. He’d even been in a good enough mood to bicker with her, again, about the effectiveness of his baseball bat in supernatural altercations. She was a little too happy to learn he’d lost it in the power station. In fact, she’s still laughing at her own joke on the subject in the passenger seat when Stiles feels it – darkness rolling into the sides of his vision, lungs constricting, his heart racing faster and faster, pumping battery acid.

And it’s weird because it’s not even really that bad yet, is it? Crazier shit has happened. Recently, even. Maybe his anxiety is just getting worse, in general, he thinks – and the possibility that he won’t be able to control his anxiety makes him even more anxious, which is just _great_.

He pulls off to the side of the road as his vision starts to blur, and whips off his seatbelt - as if that’s the reason his breathing is becoming so shallow, and not that his lungs are actually closing in on themselves, giving up on their job. Lydia is saying something, but her voice can’t quite make it all the way across the front seat of the jeep to him. It sounds like he’s underwater over here. Hey, maybe that’s why he can’t breathe, he thinks. He’s drowning.

He’s been pushing it down for the past few hours, because if what Scott said about the electricity was true…Kira is _something_. Something different that they know exactly jack-shit about. Panic feels like the only appropriate response.

But the worst part, the part that really makes Stiles’s lungs start to collapse, is that he hadn’t actually seen what had happened with Kira, because he’d blacked out. He can almost hear Scott’s voice in his head, telling him not to read into it too much, but he can’t help it. His brain just doesn’t work that way. Stiles knows that blackouts could mean any number of things; lack of blood flow to the brain, dehydration, exhaustion, anemia, low blood pressure. And if Stiles didn’t know how fucked up the world really is, he might be inclined to accept one of those answers. But WebMD doesn’t have any information on coming back to life after sacrificing yourself to a dead magic tree to stop a dark druid and leaving a door to your mind wide open. Stiles knows, he checked.

And he’s pretty sure this has something to do with that.

Lydia reaches for his closest hand, which she has to physically pry from the gearshift. She laces their fingers together, rubbing soothing circles with her thumb. “It’s gonna be okay, Stiles, okay? Look at me.” Her voice is so slow and calm, Stiles can almost feel it washing over him, imagines it leaving him completely clean.

She reaches her other hand up to cup the side of his face, runs her fingers through the hair above his ear. If he weren’t so preoccupied with falling apart, he’d realize how close she is, and probably totally combust. “Shhhh, it’s okay. You’re safe, Stiles, you’re with me.”

She grabs his other wrist, moving his hand from the steering wheel until it’s swimming in and out of focus right in front of his face. “Look,” she says gently, “only five fingers, see? You’re awake. You’re alright.”

She lets go as he scrutinizes each finger, and she’s right. Only five. He hadn’t even considered the possibility that tonight has all been a dream, and yet, the act is still extremely reassuring. The darkness in his peripheral vision starts to recede, his lungs finally start to feel like they’re getting enough air.

He lets his hand drop down on top of her other hand, the one still patiently drawing circles on his knuckles. She raises her eyebrows at him, silently asking if he’s okay. He squeezes her hand to tell her that he is, at least, as okay as he usually is these days.

They sit in silence for a while until Lydia breaks it, saying through a smirk, “Wow, can’t handle an insult to the precious baseball bat, huh? I’ll try to remember to go easy on you, from now on.”

Stiles lets out a weak laugh, “Yeah, uh…you know, me and that bat have been through a lot together, I just get…so…emotional over it.”

At this, Lydia actually rolls her head back, laughing in the loud, unrefined way that only seems to happen when it's just the two of them. “That was a lot of sarcasm to fit into one sentence, I’m impressed.”

“One of my many talents.” Stiles swallows hard before continuing, “Uh…thank you,”

The corners of Lydia’s mouth turn up, just slightly, “Yeah…anytime.” She drops her gaze down to their hands, which break apart abruptly, both of them having just realized they were still laced together. Stiles recalls quite vividly what happened the last time she’d helped him calm down from a panic attack. Lydia, he thinks, must be remembering the same thing, based on the blush appearing on her face and her determination look everywhere but his direction.

For a second, he considers making some lame joke about how disappointed he is that she didn’t kiss him this time, but it feels wrong, for some incomprehensible reason, to talk about it out loud - at least to Lydia.

As they resume the drive to Lydia’s house, the silence makes a shift from awkward to peaceful. Something about the cool night air coming in through the open windows and both of them being so tired, probably.

For the rest of the trip Stiles tries, and fails miserably, to keep his eyes on the road. They keep drifting over to the passenger seat to notice things Stiles isn’t allowed to notice anymore, like how beautiful Lydia’s hair looks right now, floating in the breeze from the window – _seriously Stiles, never gonna happen_ ; and how impressive it is that her lipstick has remained perfect, even through all the running around tonight – _stop it, it’s not gonna happen_ ; and how unfathomably cute she is, trying so hard to stay awake as her eyelids keep drooping shut – _not in a million years._

It’s hopeless; the plan to get over Lydia has crashed and burned. He’s still in love with her. Actually, the way it is now makes Stiles feel stupid for calling it love before. And god damnit, he’s so in love with her. No matter how hard he tries, he’ll probably never stop being in love with her. Not really. He’ll probably never be able to look at her without feeling this pain in his chest, without beating himself up over the undeniable fact that she doesn’t love him back.

It’s so much worse now with her up close like this. Before, that was nothing. She was something completely unobtainable, up on a pedestal to him, but now…now she’s right here. She’s real, and she keeps doing things like stopping his panic attacks, and holding his hand, and finally admitting that she thinks he’s smart. Girlfriend kind of things. It’s irresponsible.

Stiles thinks back to the other day, the whole Lydia Needs to Watch Where She’s Going Because There are Coyote Traps Everywhere Incident. How she’d clung to his hoodie so desperately, like it was a frigging life raft. The way she’d looked at him and for a split second, he thought maybe she’d kiss him again, before he remembered that he’s not allowed to think things like that.

And tonight, like the actual angel she is, she’d just jumped into helping him, didn’t even question it. Acted like it hadn’t thrown her for a loop in the slightest, just helped him remember how to breathe and then went right back to cracking jokes like nothing happened. And Stiles has just been staring at her like an idiot this whole time with a serious case of heart-eyes. He can’t help it.

How is he ever supposed to stop being so pathetically in love with her when she keeps pulling that kind of shit?

 

Later, as he rolls into his own driveway, Stiles stifles a yawn, thinks maybe tonight he’ll actually get more than three hours of sleep. But of course, as soon as his head hits the pillow, he’s wide-awake. His brain never wants to shut down.

Since he’s obviously not going to sleep, he knows he should be using this time to do some research on what kind of supernatural creature can survive being electrocuted, but he doesn’t want to. He should at least be running through the events from tonight in his head over and over and over, looking for something he missed. That’s what he would normally do, but his mind won’t cooperate. It’s all the Lydia Martin Show in there tonight.

It’s bullshit, really. Every time he thinks he’s got himself convinced, finally, to let it go, all she has to do is smile at him, and it’s over. He’s right back where he started, with no room in his head for anything else.

In particular, he can’t stop thinking about how sad she’d been earlier that day, so convinced she was wrong about Barrow being in the school. If there’s anything that Lydia hates most in the world, it’s being wrong. Well, being wrong and double-denim. But she takes it so personally when she’s wrong. Today, it was awful. Stiles could see her retreating into herself, losing that confidence that she’d worked so hard to build up all summer. Something about that really bothers Stiles, as he stares at the ceiling, still pretending he might be able to fall asleep. He wants to fix it.

Eventually, the urge to do something, anything, is too strong and Stiles has to get out of bed. Three a.m. is always his most productive hour, anyway. He paces around the room for a while, thinking about whether or not it’d be morally okay to stage an emergency that Lydia could save him from, to boost her confidence. He could get himself “kidnapped”, Scott would help with that, and he could leave just enough information for Lydia to -

Wait, that won’t work. The banshee stuff won’t happen if it’s fake. And that’s the problem here, isn’t it? She’s doubting her abilities, when they’ve saved everyone’s asses so many times before.

Then it hits him. It’s perfect.

He grabs a framed photo of him with his grandmother – sorry, grandma – from his bookshelf and ungracefully pries the backing off as he sits down at his desk. It takes him a while to find the picture he’s looking for in the small mountain of papers there, but finally, here it is. One of the drawings Lydia did of the tree that ended up being the Nemeton. He places it into the frame carefully. It’s genius. He’ll give her this, and then the next time she starts to doubt herself, when it looks like she’s wrong about something, she can just look at this tree and remember a time when she was so, so right. When, without her, there would have been no way Stiles ever would have found his dad.

He wants to attach a note to it, to explain that he doesn’t just want her to have a memento of that Fun Time When Everyone was in Danger of Being a Human Sacrifice - but as soon as the paper is in front of him, his mind goes blank. Every way he can think of to tell Lydia how amazing she is just sounds so cheesy, her eyes wouldn’t be able to roll back far enough after reading it. For a fleeting moment he thinks maybe he should go full chick-flick and turn this whole thing into a declaration of his love, and it’s so late at night that he’s feeling almost irrational and impulsive enough to do it. 

But, obviously, the only possible outcome following doing something like that is a total train wreck. It's not as if Lydia is going to completely change her mind, she's not going to ditch Aiden for Stiles - there's just no way. Everything Lydia's doing...she's just being nice. She's a just a really good friend. Though she definitely won't want to be friends anymore if she finds out Stiles is still in love with her. And outside of Scott, Lydia might just be the best friend Stiles has ever had. 

No, the only option is to get over it. He just needs to start meeting other girls, get Lydia out of his system. He considers giving up on this crazy present idea entirely, but decides against it. Just because he isn't allowed to be in love with her doesn't mean he can't let her know he has faith in her, right? He taps his pen against the edge of the desk, searching for the right way to tell Lydia, in a completely platonic and un-awkward, non-friendship-ending sort of way that he thinks she's amazing, and incredibly intelligent, and that she should never doubt her powers again. Okay, so he's kind of screwed. The sun is rising by the time the pen actually touches the paper. 

In the end, he just writes ‘Solved.’ on the inside and tapes it to the back of the frame. She’ll know what it means.

 

* * *

 

Lydia is so delirious at this point; she thinks she might just kiss Stiles when they find him. Actually kiss him, right on the mouth, just because she can.

And it doesn’t even cross her mind to really analyze how strange it would be to kiss Stiles. It doesn’t matter to her that Scott and the Sheriff and _Aiden_ are there with her, or that whoever took Stiles could still be down in the basement with him. It doesn’t matter how awkward it might make things between them. As long as Stiles is safe and warm (and capable of kissing _anyone_ ), Lydia doesn’t care about any of it.

He’s alive, Lydia is sure of it. Everything else is irrelevant.

Her heart is racing as they make their way to the basement. Something is pulling her forward, like a rubber band snapping back into place as they go, and she knows she’s getting closer to him. He’s here; she can feel it, in her bones. He’s alive. And they’re getting so close. She’s so excited, so sure that she’s about to save her best friend from hypothermia, she can’t seem to walk fast enough.

 

And then the whole thing blows up in her face.

 

She knows before the door even opens that something’s wrong. She can just feel it. Where, a second ago, she’d felt so connected to Stiles, like he was right next to her, now he’s just…gone. She’s more sure of it with every step down into the basement. He’s not here. He never was.

Desperately, she tries to reach out, to contact Stiles again, to figure out why he would lead her here, and where he could possibly be. But there’s nothing else. Just this room. This has to be it. It makes no sense.

Lydia’s heart drops into her stomach as surges of guilt and disappointment and fear (overwhelming fear, because if Stiles isn’t here, where the hell is he?) wash over her. She wants to run away from all of it, to leave Beacon Hills with all its monsters and never look back. But she knows she can’t. She can hardly force herself up the stairs out of the basement. She can’t run, she can’t help. She lead everyone here, wasted so much time, and it was all for nothing. She’s completely useless. And Stiles…Lydia’s only comfort is that he must still be alive, because if he died, she would surely know.

 

The next hour is unbearable, to put it mildly.

After the Eichen fiasco, no one knows what to do. Scott can’t catch the scent, Lydia can’t hear anything. They’re out of leads. The Sheriff is desperate, talking about going back to the house, searching Stiles’s room for something they may have missed, some clue to his whereabouts that Lydia is sure doesn’t exist, although she won’t say it out loud.

Not that Lydia has anything to offer. Try though she might to find some solution in the recesses of her brain, there’s nothing. All she can think about is how Stiles had looked the last time she saw him, leaving school yesterday.

For Lydia, it was a normal day (well, relatively normal). She was on her way to AP Lit when she ran into Stiles in the hall, looking frenzied and heading the wrong direction. And his face…well, unfortunately Lydia was used to seeing it this way. Distressed.

“Hey,” she called out, stopping him, “what’s wrong, where are you going?” As she spoke, the bell rang and the hallway cleared out, leaving just the two of them. (Lydia was definitely going to be late for class, but she didn’t care.)

“Uh, I’m just…I’m going home…I, uh –“ Stiles couldn’t seem to find the right words to go on, couldn’t quite look Lydia in the eyes.

“Stiles,” she started, reaching out to brush his arm with one hand, “it’s me. What’s going on?”

Stiles took a deep breath before he finally said it, “I think I’m losing my mind, Lydia. I, uh…I’m the one that wrote the message to kill Kira.”

“What? Stiles that doesn’t make any –“

“No, I know I did it Lydia. This morning, I had an extra key, and it was the key to the chemistry closet. The writing we saw on the chalkboard, Lydia, that was my handwriting. But now…now it’s all gone so maybe I'm just seeing things - I don’t…I don’t –“

If Lydia had to guess, she’d say he was about to go into a full panic attack.

“Hey,” she said, putting on her sweetest, calmest voice (the voice she saved specifically for him, for moments like this - not that Lydia would ever admit it), “Stiles, you’re not a killer, okay? You save people. There are plenty of ways to explain this. Hallucinations and vivid dreams can be caused by so many things, Stiles. Dehydration, fever, sleep deprivation.”

Stiles still wouldn’t look directly at her, but he nodded in agreement. “Look, Stiles, maybe you shouldn’t go home. Go to the hospital, alright? There’s a perfectly nonsupernatural, medical reason for this, I’m sure of it.”

“Yeah, yeah okay,” he mumbled, already lost in thought.

And that was it. He walked away after that, right out of the school. Scott texted her with updates later that night, but that was the last time she’d actually spoken to him. One of her best friends.

 

As Scott and the Sheriff go on, making calls and hypothesizing, Lydia pleads with Stiles in her head. _Wherever you are_ , she thinks, _I don’t care. Just please don’t die._

They’re all right on the edge of descending into complete panic when the call comes in. And then, none of it seems very important anymore. It’s completely insignificant, where he was or how he got there or how Scott’s dad figured it out when they couldn’t. He’s awake, he’s safe, he’s with Melissa. He’s okay.

Sitting in the waiting room of the hospital, Lydia feels…nothing. She’s only partially aware of everything happening around her. All the worrying, the speculating, the panicked whispers of everyone who loves Stiles, trying to piece together what little information they have. The questions greatly outnumber the answers. 

To Lydia, it all seems so far away. Like all of this happened to someone else and she just read about it. Next to her, Scott looks empty, too. He’s wringing his hands together, staring at his shoelaces as if they might suddenly decide to reveal that they know how to fix everything. How sad they must look, she thinks. Hollow shells.

Scott must feel her eyes on him, because suddenly he speaks, sounding about 150 years older than he is. “He thinks he was the one that let Barrow into the school...there was this key, and –“

“Yeah,” Lydia says hoarsely, “he told me. He said he thought he was losing his mind.”

“Yeah.” Scott runs a hand through his hair. “I just…I don’t know what’s happening to him. I don’t – I don’t know what to do.”

Lydia just reaches out for his hand as silence settles back over them, because she doesn’t think she can find the right words for this. Maybe there aren’t any.

 

Lydia doesn’t sleep much that night. She can’t seem to calm herself down. She doesn’t see any logical reason her heart should be pumping as fast as it is. Maybe she’s been spending too much time with Stiles lately, and his anxiety is rubbing off on her, she thinks. She makes a mental note to complain about it to him the next time she sees him. It seems like the kind of stupid thing that would make him laugh, hearing something so unscientific come out of Lydia's mouth. 

Thinking about Stiles makes Lydia feel a little bit like falling. Like the floor beneath her bed is crumbling, and any second now she’ll drop all the way into the core of the earth. It’s just guilt, Lydia knows. (She’s familiar with the sensation – once she got a B+ on a trigonometry assignment.) Tonight, though, might be the most guilty she’s ever felt. The facts just keep piling on top of her, weighing her down further. She was wrong, completely, unforgivably wrong at a time when it mattered most. She’d failed as a banshee and a friend. Stiles…he could have died, easily. And then what would Lydia have done? It hurts to consider it.

She wonders how he’s doing after everything tonight. Hopefully he’s asleep right now (like Lydia would be, if she could successfully navigate her mind away from him). Although, if she’d woken up screaming and freezing to death in a cave she’d probably never want to go to sleep again. So, probably not.

Exhausted, miserable, and decidedly done being a banshee, Lydia throws the covers over her head and waits for the sun to rise.

 

* * *

 

Although it seems statistically unlikely, the next day things actually get worse. Just when Lydia has decided to swear off all Banshee Feelings™, they come in droves. All day, she hears everything. Every moderately cacophonous sound is at full volume for her. Every locker shutting, every key jingling in someone’s pocket – they’re deafening. And underneath those, there’s an awful sound – this persistent metal clanging that won’t leave her alone.

She can’t even make it through a full school day. What’s happening to her? Lydia normally never skips school. But today, when Scott tells her they’ll be doing tests on Stiles, she just loses it. Suddenly, she puts it together – and it’s so overwhelming, she actually has to run away. Hearing an MRI machine when Stiles is about to go into one, it can’t be a coincidence. Does this mean Stiles is going to die? Lydia never had a chance to figure out how to be a banshee before she’d resolved to stop being one.

She told Scott she was going home, but she can’t. The thought of sitting at home, alone, waiting to hear news about Stiles – it’s intolerable. Instead, she just drives around town for the rest of the afternoon, madly trying to outrun sound waves.

Of course, that’s scientifically impossible. Lydia knows that. If anything, the noises just get worse. The metal clanging just keeps getting louder and louder, making her feel more and more hysterical as it goes. After it finally gets so loud that Lydia absolutely has to scream, it stops completely.

What that means, she has no way of knowing. And Lydia _hates_ not knowing things. Unanswered questions like this never really leave her, they just burn somewhere in her ribcage, incinerating all of the oxygen that belongs in her lungs.

 

She finds herself parking in Allison’s driveway before she makes the conscious decision to go there. She almost forgets to take the key out of the ignition; she’s in such a hurry to get inside, as if some of Allison’s extraordinary strength will transfer to Lydia and she’ll be able to handle this.

Allison, because she is quite possibly the most wonderful human being Lydia has ever met, says all of the right things. Sitting on the edge of Allison’s bed, (and fighting a bout of ugly sobbing) Lydia explains everything, from her complete failure at Eichen House up until now, wondering if Stiles is dying.

“Well,” Allison starts, without a shred of judgement in her voice, “that doesn't necessarily mean anything. You’ve heard some things before when no one’s died, right? The other day, you heard the flies in the school just because Barrow was there, right? He wasn’t dying.”

Lydia lies back on the bed, hands over her eyes. “I don’t know, Allison. I don’t know how any of this works. I…I didn’t ask for this. I never asked to be a banshee. I don’t want to be notified that people are about to die. Especially since I can’t help them. I'm done.”

She feels Allison lie down on the bed next to her. “Lydia…you saved Kira’s life the other day – because you’re a banshee. If you hadn’t heard what you did…” 

Lydia shakes her head miserably, Allison doesn't understand, "That...that was just luck. I didn't even know what I was doing."

"That wasn't luck. Kira was in real danger, and you figured out how to help her. And sure, maybe you didn't know what you were doing, but you didn't give up, either. That counts for something."

Lydia lowers her hands, and turns her head to face Allison, “But, why this? If I'm hearing Stiles' MRI, doesn't that mean he's in danger too? That he's about to die?”

"Hey, no one is going to die. We're gonna figure it out, okay? There's got to be another reason you're hearing him." Allison starts to smile a little too mischievously for Lydia's liking, "You know... _maybe._..you're just feeling more connected to him because...you want to be with him?"

Okay, definitely not even remotely among the things Lydia was expecting Allison to say. “What?”

“Don’t even act like you haven’t been staring at him every second he’s not looking.”

Lydia feels all of her blood rushing to her face. She turns back to the ceiling, avoiding Allison’s eyes. “I haven't. You’re delusional.”

Allison laughs. “Okay, okay, nevermind. Just an idea..." Lydia rolls her eyes as dramatically as she can as Allison's laughter dies down. After a minute, she moves to prop herself up on one elbow, facing Lydia with her eyebrows scrunched together. "Hey, remember what Deaton said about the ice baths? He said you were emotional tethers; you had to pull him back, right? It could just be that, you know, that connection.”

Lydia turns the possibility over in her mind. “Do you feel more connected to Isaac? Do you…feel whatever he’s feeling?”

“Well, no," Allison says solemnly, "but I’m also not a banshee, either.”

No part of this explanation sounds very logical at all, but Lydia clings to it anyway. She releases a deep breath, staring at the light on Allison’s ceiling in hopes that it will keep her from crying.

“Look, Lydia,” Allison says, “we’ll figure it out, okay? I promise. Someone has to know how this works. We’ll find someone who can explain it, and by senior year you’ll be the best banshee in Beacon Hills.”

“And if I’m the only banshee in Beacon Hills?”

“Well then you’re already the best.”

Lydia laughs, thanking every deity she’s ever read about in her head for Allison Argent. Having someone who actually listens, and cares, and has complete confidence in her is so great, Lydia wonders why she didn’t try to make real friends sooner. Feeling much calmer, and just a little bit desperate to change the subject so she can at least pretend to feel normal and in control again, Lydia says, “I love that shirt, by the way.”

“Thanks. You were with me when I bought it.”

“I know.”

 

* * *

 

Stiles is starting to get used to waking up in strange places he doesn’t remember falling asleep in.

This time, he wakes abruptly, more panicked than usual. His heart is pounding - he knows he shouldn’t have been asleep for some reason. He feels anxious about it. There was something bad happening, something he needed to do. But he can’t remember.

He tries to take in his surroundings, but it’s so dark. Nothing looks familiar. Oh, and as if things couldn’t get any better, he’s tied to the chair he’s sitting in, somehow. His wrists can’t move more than a few inches away from the armrests. Something is moving slightly on the floor a few feet away. Stiles can’t make out what it is, exactly; he’ll need to get out of this chair to find out.

It takes him a long time – way too long – to free one of his hands. Maybe the Argents are onto something with those crazy training rituals, he thinks dully as he fumbles with the straps on his ankles. Then, standing up, suddenly everything about this seems very familiar. He’s done this before.

He wastes no time getting to the figure in the corner for a better look. It’s a girl. Stiles is relieved to notice that she’s breathing slowly, probably just asleep. She’s wearing all grey, her face obscured by long, curly hair. It’s…it’s Malia, he realizes. He knows her. Then it all comes rushing back to him – the Eichen House basement, the skeleton in the wall, a drill about to bore a hole in Malia’s head, and… _him._ He was here. He was right there, screaming at Stiles to let him in, and Stiles had to…

It makes no sense. Where had he gone? Is Stiles actually in control of his own body, right now? Or is this some trick, letting him think he’s managed to escape, waiting until Stiles leads him to his friends before he takes over?

Whether or not he’s possessed, he needs to get moving. He needs to get Malia out of here, and then as far away from him as possible.

He calls out her name, crouches down to shake her shoulder, but…something’s wrong. He reaches out to brush the hair out of her eyes, which he finds disturbingly wide open, staring at nothing. Then he notices it, a dark pool of blood around her head. His breath catches in his throat. The blood wasn’t there earlier, when he first saw her, was it? His hands, shaking, move from Malia to his own face, but suddenly one of them feels too heavy, he’s holding something. He doesn’t remember picking anything up, and yet…

He’s holding that drill, and blood is dripping from the end of it. His hand lets go of the tool on its own, and it falls to the floor with a loud metal clang.

Before he really processes what he’s doing, he’s up the stairs and throwing his shoulder against a door that won’t budge, until finally, it flies open into the hallway…except, it’s not a hallway at all. He’s outside.

He whips around, but the door he just came through is gone. There’s only trees, on all sides of him. He’s out in the middle of the woods, somehow. In the dark. Alone.

Okay, he thinks, looking down at his trembling hands, counting six fingers on each one. Okay. Just another fucking nightmare.

He’s about to just sit down on the ground, he’s too tired for this. It’s too hard. He knows now, he’s lost. He’s trapped in his own head while that thing runs around, wearing his face and doing God knows what to everyone he loves. He doesn’t have it in him to fight it, even if he knew how. Will the dream just keep going if he refuses to participate? Can he still be afraid if he doesn’t go looking for it? If he just doesn’t care?

But before he can move, a voice causes his whole body to freeze.

“Just out of curiosity, which half of the body are we looking for?”

It’s Scott. Stiles would recognize his voice anywhere. But it’s weird, it’s younger. He’s listening to a conversation from a lifetime ago.

“Huh! I didn't even think about that.” This voice is his own, but it’s not coming from him. It’s off to the right of him, in the darkness. He can see the pinprick of light from a flashlight in the distance. They’re just a few yards away, walking towards him. Looking for half a body, with no idea what’s about to happen.

“And, uh, what if whoever killed the body is still out here?”

“Also something I didn't think about.”

“It's comforting to know you've planned this out with your usual attention to detail.”

Stiles doesn’t have the willpower to tune them out. And when a younger version of himself runs past him, with Scott behind, shouting at him to slow down, he follows them without questioning it. He needs to see what happens - he never was very good at leaving things alone.

 

They basically lead him into his own personal hell.

 

For how long, Stiles has no concept. Time doesn’t have any meaning here. How long has it been since that thing walked out of Eichen House wearing Stiles’ face? Hours? Years? Is everyone he’s ever known dead already? He has no way of knowing. In here, it’s just nightmare after nightmare after nightmare. Every time he gets away from something, he opens his eyes to a new horror, just waiting for him.

He watches everyone he loves die, over and over and over, in the most horrible ways he could ever think of. His dad, Scott, Lydia, Melissa, Derek, Malia, Isaac, Allison…he’s stuck in a never-ending cycle, finding their bodies again and again. Most of the time, he’s the one killing them. Stiles tries not to think about what that means for what’s happening out in the real world.

Half of the time he’s in one of his own memories, except now they’re all so much worse. They don’t find the woman’s body that they were looking for, instead, they find the Sheriff, torn to shreds. His badge crumpled up and covered in blood. Next, he’s on the Cross Country bus, next to Scott, who is doubled over, bleeding. But this time he doesn’t help him, instead he watches, horrified, as his own hands reach up to push a knife into his best friend’s stomach. Then, he’s on the lacrosse field, running as fast as he can toward Lydia, but this time he’s the one chasing her, he’s the one ripping out her throat.

It goes on like this until Stiles is pretty sure he has no good memories left.

Sometimes, he closes his eyes to stop seeing all of it, and when he opens them again it’s like waking up. He’s in his bed, at home. For a second, he thinks maybe it’s actually over. But it’s just another trick. As soon as he gets up, he’s back, surrounded by everything he’s ever been afraid of, watching everyone he’s ever known die a horribly violent death.

And that damn tree. It’s always there. Wherever he goes, whenever he tries to run away, there it is.

Eventually, it stops hurting. Interestingly enough, if you see the same person die a hundred times, it doesn’t affect you much anymore. He stops trying to save them after a while. He just lets each new wave of terror flow through him.

Of course, that’s when things get worse.

A door he runs out of in the High School opens into a dark, deserted hallway in the Beacon Hills Hospital. He tries to mentally prepare himself to watch Melissa die, again. A light comes in through an open door at the end of the hallway. _Great_ , he thinks, _always a fan of the dramatic walk down the long dark hallway._

He makes the walk anyway, because no matter how terrible it is, he still needs to know what’s in that room, what it’s doing to Melissa. But as he approaches the door, he hears a woman’s voice that is definitely not Melissa’s. In fact, it’s a voice he completely wasn’t expecting to hear. Slowly, he peeks around the door frame, because he needs to know, for sure, that it’s her, but he doesn’t think he can stand to go all the way into the room if she’s about to die.

And there she is. His mom.

Stiles is frozen in place. His eyes can’t soak up enough of her. She looks great, as healthy as a woman lying in a hospital bed could look. And she’s beautiful, so much more beautiful than Stiles even remembers her. She smiles at someone sitting next to her bed, who Stiles just now notices. It’s his father, younger than he is now.

Stiles is vaguely aware that his eyes are filling up with tears, but it doesn’t seem important. He’s a kid again, he probably just got bored and ran down to the vending machine, and now he’s back, listening to his parents – both of his parents – talking softly, probably about hospital bills, or the latest incident at the school that dad had to meet with the principal about. None of it matters. As long as his mom keeps laughing about it. She has a great laugh.

Her eyes slide over to the doorframe, finally spotting Stiles. He starts to smile at her, but something isn’t right, all of the sudden. Her face shifts, she’s not smiling anymore, but screaming. She’s afraid. “It’s him!” She shouts, pointing up at Stiles, “He’s the one that did this to me! He’s _killing_ me!”

Stiles steps back, unsure of what’s happening, and watches in disbelief as his dad stands up, reaching for his gun, staring at Stiles with a level of anger he hasn’t ever seen. Stiles is so shocked, he’d actually forgotten for a second that this was just a nightmare, and remembering this fact sends his heart to the floor. He doesn’t feel like running, this time. He just closes his eyes, waits for the gunshot.

It doesn’t come, though. When he opens his eyes, he’s underwater. He shoots up, gasping for air desperately. All of it is very familiar. He’s in a metal tub, in that bright white room, looking for that stupid tree that caused all of this.

To either side of his tub, Allison and Scott lie in their own, eyes wide open, unmoving. _They’re dead_ , he thinks, _what else is new?_

He turns around and there it is – the Nemeton. Right where he left it. But this time, someone else is already sitting on it. Him.

All Stiles wants to do is stop. To lie back down under the water and just try to unsee the terrified look on his mom’s face. He’s done. Whatever this is, he’s not playing along anymore. Stiles forces himself to walk forward.

As he reaches the edge of the Nemeton, he can’t decide which is worse – this one, with the sharp metal teeth, or seeing his own face and knowing that this is what’s really behind it. “What do you want?” Stiles says, barely a whisper.

“To win.” The Nogitsune gestures a cloth-covered hand to some kind of game board laid out in front of him.

Stiles tries, futilely, to keep his voice even. “This is…this is all a game to you?”

The Nogitsune nods. “Play, Stiles.”

Stiles opens his mouth to make some sarcastic remark, to say he can take his stupid game and shove it – but…he can’t do it. He just doesn’t have the energy. He’s decimated.

 

All he can do is climb up onto the Nemeton and play a Japanese board game with the demon that’s probably killing all of his friends.


	4. Exponential Decay

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, and thank you to everyone for the kudos, bookmarks and comments left on this! It's really appreciated. :) 
> 
> Feel free to come chat with me on tumblr as well! (Mrtinsky.tumblr.com)

 

* * *

It only takes Lydia three minutes to realize something isn't right. Unfortunately, those three minutes in particular are what brought her here: speeding away from her friends and any concept of safety with an evil, Japanese demon riding shotgun.

So, things were a little out of control.

Not that there was really any way she could have seen this coming. The possibility that this might not actually be Stiles hadn't even crossed her mind. And when this Stiles had started to make a run for it, grabbing Lydia's hand and frantically begging her to just get him away from that thing, to get him somewhere safe, well, of course Lydia ran with him. What choice did she have?

She hadn't even considered the danger in it. Stiles (well, the person she thought was Stiles) needed her help. She wouldn't have been able to let him go on his own, even if she'd wanted to. She just wasn't wired that way, not anymore.

She's kicking herself for it now, though.

As soon as they backed out of the driveway she could feel it, that something wasn't quite right. But Banshee Premonitions be damned - nothing mattered outside of helping Stiles. And he was so scared. Shaking, tears rolling down his face - it was heartbreaking to look at. Lydia, in that moment, was painfully aware that her friends had become the most important thing in her life - she would walk straight into hell to save any of them, and burn to death to do it.

(And walking into hell is pretty much what she was doing as she peeled out of Scott’s neighborhood at full speed.)

It wasn’t until he started laughing that Lydia realized the full extent of what she had done. It was so unnerving, hearing something so entirely un-Stiles coming out of his mouth. The real Stiles’s laugh was so much wilder, bursting out like it just couldn't be contained. That laugh was warmth, radiating out of Lydia’s heart, all the way to her toes - but this...this was cold, dark, and calculated. It made something in Lydia's chest squeeze in on itself.

And she knew, right then. This wasn't her friend. He was back at the house. In some completely inexplicable way, he was the one that had crawled up out of the floor. Lydia couldn’t possibly explain how she knew, but she was certain. She’d run away (willingly, even) with the wrong Stiles, and now she was totally screwed.

She knew something else, too. The air shifted around her. An ashy taste filled her mouth. Death. She was starting to get used to the feeling, but this - it was so much closer than it had ever been. It physically hurt, it was so close to her, crushing her from all sides. Just over her shoulder, breathing on her neck and sending shivers down her spine. And then she could hear them, in her head - her friends making a plan to come and save her. She might not be the greatest banshee of all time, but she knew what it meant.

If her friends found her, they were going to die.

Now, Lydia drives robotically, following the directions hissed into her right ear. Mentally, she’s frozen in place. That’s the problem with all this banshee bullshit. There’s no certainty, either way. No specifications on who, exactly, is going to die (not to mention how, when, where or why). There isn’t even any real reassurance that one of her friends is actually going to die - she's read these things wrong plenty of times (she remembers the sinking feeling when Stiles wasn’t actually in the basement of Eichen with a pang). But what can she do? She can’t just ignore this. It’s the most unsettling feeling she’s ever experienced. This definitely isn’t about a stranger. And her friends...it’s certainly their voices that she’s hearing, whispering behind her. She can’t risk doubting herself, can she? Based on the empirical data, there’s still a probability she could be right, this time.

_You’ve been right every time something like this has happened._

Okay. She has to do something, has to assume she’s right about this, doesn’t she? Then it comes to her. She relaxes her grip on the steering wheel - having a plan always makes her feel better.

She just has to make sure he doesn't notice that anything is wrong. Suddenly, Lydia is very grateful for all the time she spent at school, acting like someone she wasn’t. Pretending to be fine, bored even, when internally she’s falling to pieces is her specialty.

Then, she just has to wait for him to look in the other direction to add letters to her message on the window. Allison will check for it, she knows. It’s how she used to talk to Scott when they weren’t supposed to be seeing each other. And Allison will know that Lydia remembers that. Well, even if she doesn't, it doesn't really matter, because Lydia doesn’t have any other options.

She manages to write the final letter with her finger just in time, as the Nogtisune tells her to stop the car in a parking lot. She allows herself a miniscule smile. When they find her car, Allison will see it: Don’t find me. It’s a little vague, but it’ll have to do, because it’s time to leave the car behind. Lydia’s heart starts racing as she pulls the keys out of the ignition. No plan for this part.

She can’t outrun him, can’t fight him. She can’t rely on hope that her friends will find her, because she doesn’t want them to, (not that she’d ever let her captor know that particular fact). She wracks her brain for any course of action that won’t get her (or anyone she loves) killed, but nothing is coming.

All she’s really capable of doing at the moment is acting like she isn’t nearly as broken and afraid as she feels. “They’re going to find me,” she says in her haughtiest voice, head high.

She swallows down the rising terror in her throat, threatening to choke her, as she walks away from the car, hoping against all sanity that her friends will heed her warning. That for once, Allison won’t see someone telling her not to do something as a challenge to do exactly that.

There’s a first time for everything, right?

* * *

Ironically enough, Stiles used to dream about waking up like this. Well - waking up with Lydia’s head on his chest, anyway. However, the cold, dark hallway, Lydia crying, and the fact that he hadn’t actually fallen asleep so much as passed out from exhaustion after running a very short distance - not things Stiles had really envisioned, back then.

Stiles remembers, suddenly, why they’d been running. It takes a lot of effort, but he makes himself pull his head forward, to see Lydia, to tell her he’s okay, that they need to get going, they need to save their friends, but - something’s wrong. Lydia isn’t moving. She isn’t trying to wake Stiles, isn't trying to get to where everyone else is. She’s sobbing into Stiles’ chest, one fist twisted up in his shirt. Whatever’s happening out there, Lydia isn’t trying to do anything about it. She’s given up.

But Lydia would never give up. Not if it meant someone was dying, not unless -

“Lydia,” he barely manages to say, his voice sounding too ragged to possibly belong to him, “who...who is it?”

Lydia doesn’t move to look at him as she whispers, “Allison.”

He uses what’s left of his energy to raise one arm up to rest around her shoulders. It seems like the only thing he knows how to do, at the moment. Lydia buries her face into his shirt, sobbing. Stiles is vaguely aware he should be doing something about this, that it’s his job to jump into action at the sight of Lydia crying, but he can't seem to get his brain to work on a plan. He can’t even speak, can hardly breathe. His chest has caved in, somehow. He’s not still a person, is he? Just a pile of rubble.

After that, everything happens too fast. How long have they been sitting like this, seconds? Hours? Time is incomprehensible. Then Allison’s dad is there, shouting something that doesn’t quite make it into Stiles’ head. None of this is actually happening though, right? It can’t be.

He feels himself being lifted up as Argent half-carries, half-drags Stiles out of the tunnel. At least, he’s pretty sure it’s Argent. Everything is out of focus.

And then, there’s Scott. And there she is. Stiles feels the reality of it punch him in the gut. Whatever feeble attempt he was making at walking stops abruptly. All of the air rushes out of his lungs, and he’s not totally sure he remembers how to replace it. Someone is shouting his name, Kira, maybe? Stiles doesn’t really care. _I did this,_ he thinks numbly, taking in Allison’s arm splayed out awkwardly on the ground, totally still. _My fault._

As the edges of his vision go dark, the last thing Stiles remembers before blacking out again is watching his best friend lift up a shaking hand to brush hair back from Allison’s face. She doesn’t move.

* * *

Numbly, Lydia makes a mental note to research how much grief and trauma a human can take before they start to physically deteriorate. How long before her brain creates too much cortisone and her immune system shuts down? She’s not even sure how she’s been able to do things like stand and walk and breathe since last night, when Allison -

Her thought is cut off by a sharp pain radiating through her chest. Immediately, she forces her brain to switch gears - to think about something, anything else. (Something that doesn’t make Lydia wish the earth would reach up and swallow her whole, preferably.)

Stiles, she thinks, focus on Stiles.

Lydia has, admittedly, never given much thought to Stiles’ eyes. She knows they’re brown, but what shade exactly? Light, like amber? Dark, whiskey colored? Lydia can’t remember, and honestly, she never had much reason to care. At least until today. Now, Lydia would give up every pair of shoes she owns to see them - she needs to memorize them, needs to see them darting around the room madly, looking for clues. It’s all she can think about.

Because, at the moment, she’s desperate for him to wake up and show them to her.

He’s probably only been out a few minutes, really, but every second has been excruciating, particularly because it’s all so unfair. The plan had worked, they’d killed the Nogitsune and now everything was supposed to start being okay again. Stiles was supposed to be fine. (Not that anything ever works out the way it’s supposed to, at least not here. Not for Lydia.)

Another minute goes by. Scott assures everyone that he can still hear Stiles’s heart beating, but it doesn’t do much to calm Lydia’s nerves. (Hearts still beat during irreversible comas, so what does it matter?) She nods at him, anyway. No one speaks after that.

Lydia doesn’t tell Scott about the scratching feeling that’s been in the back of her throat all day. She doesn’t tell him about the sinking sensation in her ribcage. Or the ash in her mouth. She knows what it means. She doesn't want to think about it. She doesn’t want to think about anything, really.

Besides, what good would it do? Even with this feeling that she's had all day, this isn't something she could have prevented. Not that she hadn't tried - she'd spent all night clutching Stiles’ shirt for dear life like he might fade away any second. Irrationally thinking that as long as she was always right there next to him, she would feel it when something was actually about to happen. She would push him out of the way just before the samurai sword ran through him. But look how successful that had been - he’d survived all of the fighting, but now he’s going to die anyway, isn’t he? She feels something inside her collapsing.

 _He’s not going to die_ , she tries, desperately, to assure herself. _You’ve been wrong so many times before, and you’re wrong this time. He’s not going to die. Not like this._

Of course, no matter what she tells herself, nothing can settle the whirlpool of guilt in her stomach, because - once again - she’s failed. She hadn’t been able to stop this from happening. Once again, she feels the crushing reality that this power of hers is so completely pointless. What good is it, knowing someone’s going to die, when you can’t actually do anything to help them?

She makes herself take in a deep, ragged breath. Thinking about all the things she wishes she could have prevented lately just threatens to send her into a spiral, and if she starts digging up all the guilt she has buried at her core she'll never be able to stop. And then what? She’d be even more useless than she already is. And right now, her friends still need her. Think about something else, she tells herself sternly, you can fall apart later.

Although, she knows in her bones that if Stiles doesn’t wake up soon, she may never be able to put herself back together.

She reaches out for his hand, and clutches it as tight as she can, desperately hoping she'll be able to wake Stiles up through sheer force of will. She clamps her eyes shut and negotiates with him in her head - _Stiles, if you wake up right now and say something stupid I’ll tell you that I’ve always secretly loved Star Wars. I’ll never make fun of your Jeep again. I’ll let you pick the snacks at every movie night for the foreseeable future._

Stiles doesn’t make any indication he’s heard her terms. She tightens her grasp on his hand, fully aware that this boy was never supposed to be this important to her, but that hadn’t stopped it from happening.

She’d been so distracted with druids and werewolves and the voices in her head, and Stiles had just been sneaking up on her, all this time. Becoming something essential in her life, a variable she has to account for in every decision.

And she’d been fine before, blissfully unaware that her conversations with him had become the best part of any day, or that wrapped up in his arms was now the only place Lydia truly felt safe, or that, even now, she can still feel his kiss on her lips, the way it radiated through her like an electric current, leaving her with every molecule shattered.

She can’t un-notice those things. Can’t go back in time, to when Stiles was just some dork she didn’t care about, on the outside of the walls she’d built so carefully. No, somehow, she’s ended up here, in the dark hallway of the high school, with her knees pressed uncomfortably into the floor, crushing Stiles fingers in her own – frustrated, terrified, and, alright, maybe just a little bit in love with him.

 _Allison is going to be so smug about this,_ she thinks, remembering their conversation a few days ago. _She’s going to – oh._

Lydia tries to make herself think about something else, but between Allison and Stiles there isn’t much to focus on that doesn’t make Lydia’s heart hurt too much to keep breathing.

With another wave of pain, she remembers the note attached to the back of that picture frame Aiden found. For Lydia. If Stiles doesn’t wake up, she knows she’ll never read it. She’ll never be able to. She’ll just let this knowledge, this love or whatever it is, settle inside her, and she’ll never be able to shake it.

This is all so wrong, Lydia can’t stand it. She looks down at Stiles again, thinking that if her heart feels like it’s full of ashes now, it will be completely demolished if he dies. And he’s probably going to die.

Lydia closes her eyes, knowing a complete mental breakdown is coming, but wanting to spend as long as she can in the moment before it does.

And that’s when Stiles finally speaks. “Oh god, I fainted, didn’t I.”

He’s okay. It’s enough, for now, to keep her pain from burying her alive. She feels a smile stretching across her face.

* * *

It’s gotten so quiet, it’s hard to believe everything had been so insane only a few hours ago. Not that Stiles is likely to forget any of it. Watching yourself literally turn into dust is probably something that sticks with you for a while.

But, comparatively to the rest of last week, that’s actually a happy memory. Stiles tries not to ruminate on how fucked up that is.  
It’s too quiet, he thinks as he glances around the living room. Scott, sprawled out on the recliner, is fast asleep. He’d pretty much passed out the moment he sat down. Poor guy. Getting sliced up with samurai swords really takes it out of you. Lydia, on the couch next to him, on the other hand, looks wide awake. Even in the dark, Stiles can tell she’s just staring straight ahead, having barely moved in the last hour.

They’d all called their parents to check in before they left the school, trying to find out what they could do to help, where they needed to go, but Stiles’s dad had pretty much ordered him to go home, and his friends had agreed. In the car, Stiles tried explaining how pained his father had sounded on the phone, argued that they needed to go to the hospital, needed to help – but his protests fell on deaf ears.  
When they reached his house after dropping off Kira, he had been fully expecting Lydia and Scott to leave him in the driveway. Instead, they’d made their way inside before he had a chance to say anything.

Stiles is extremely grateful. He didn’t have the guts to say it aloud, but somehow his friends just knew. He probably can’t handle being alone. Not yet.

And speaking of things that seem irreparable, sleep is starting to seem more and more impossible for him. Not that Stiles isn’t exhausted. He just can’t seem to convince himself to keep his eyes closed, because, deep down, he’s not entirely convinced it’s over. If he lets himself fall asleep, will he wake up screaming - or wake up as someone else? Whose life is he risking this time?

Sleep is overrated, anyway.

Lydia looks like she could really use a solid eight hours. She’s definitely earned it. Hopefully, Stiles thinks, she’s just awake because she’s still too amped up on adrenaline, but he knows what it’s more likely to be. It’s him. And hey, Stiles can’t blame her. He doesn’t want to be alone in the dark with himself either. Of course she doesn’t want to sleep three feet away from the same face that kidnapped her, tormented her, and then killed her best friend and her boyfriend.

Stiles would understand if Lydia never speaks to him again. He deserves as much.

“Lydia,” he whispers, “you know, you – you don’t have to stay here. If you don’t want to be around me, it’s…”

“What?” Lydia turns to him with brows scrunched together.

“After…everything I know it’s probably hard to be around me and if you want to go you can –“

“Why would it be hard for me to be around you?” Lydia’s voice is hoarse.

It takes Stiles a few breaths before he can say it. “Lydia, Allison is dead because of me. You should hate me. And you can, I understand.”

Lydia’s eyes move to focus on a spot on the floor, like she might be able to set the carpet on fire through pure concentration. She stays like that for a while, breathing a little more rapidly than before, and Stiles is pretty sure she’s just waiting, mentally pacing before she gets up, slaps him in the face and walks out.

That’s actually what he’s kind of hoping will happen.

Instead, she reaches over, without moving her eyes from the floor, and grabs his hand. Squeezing it gently, she whispers, “Don’t make me lose you, too.”

Stiles feels another wave of guilt roll through him. The last thing Lydia deserves to be is alone.  
“Okay.”

But if he’s being honest with himself, just looking at Lydia makes him feel so guilty he could be crushed under the weight of it.

* * *

Allison’s funeral is scheduled for the following Sunday. It’s cloudy, and drizzling outside, which is slightly infuriating because Allison deserves the sunniest, most gorgeous day the universe has to offer.

She also doesn’t deserve to be buried in the Beacon Hills Cemetery, next to her psychopathic aunt. If Lydia had her way, Allison would be somewhere much more scenic and beautiful – probably somewhere deep in the woods, Allison would like that. (Although really, if Lydia had her way, Allison would be here, right next to her, laughing.)

Lydia puts more care into getting ready for the service than she has for every high school dance she’s ever attended. On the off chance that Allison is somewhere better, watching all of this, then Lydia needs her to see that she’s getting the absolute best.

She picks out the perfect long-sleeved black dress (high collared and lacey, intentionally more Allison’s style than her own) complete with a shade of nail polish Allison had given her as a birthday present. She puts the most elaborate braid she knows into her hair, brushes on her most expensive eyeshadow, and draws eyeliner on with a delicate hand. Finally, just before leaving, she breaks out her favorite tube of lipstick – it feels like war paint as she puts it on.

Hopefully, someone has remembered to do the same for Allison. She could always pull off the deepest shades of red.

Getting ready, Lydia is acutely aware that she feels nothing. In fact, she hasn’t really felt anything all week. And she knows how she should feel, of course. At any point during the past eight days, Lydia knows she could have sobbed, screamed, or snapped and broken everything within arms reach – and no one could have blamed her.

She’d never been the type of person to have friends that actually cared about her, or people that she actually wanted to spend time with, not just use to elevate her social status. Not until Allison. And Allison is gone. If Lydia really let herself think about everything she’s lost, she’d probably completely fall to pieces – but Lydia hasn’t been thinking about it.

She’s been keeping herself completely distracted by focusing all of her brainpower on how everyone around her is doing. She did everything she could – in the past week, she’d checked on everyone borderline religiously, helped Stiles navigate his way out of three panic attacks and completely prevented another two, made a point to spend time with Kira to make sure she still felt included, even started showing Malia around, making it a priority to help acclimate her to human (well, technically were-coyote) life.

When no one needed anything in particular, Lydia threw herself into school, staying more than caught up so everyone else could take time off to deal with this without completely falling behind. If she found herself alone, she spent the time reading and rereading and reading ahead in every textbook she had. Someone needed to make sure the pack kept up high enough GPA’s to get into college.

At first, Lydia needed the distractions to keep from thinking about them. She couldn’t miss Aiden or Allison if she just never let herself think about them. Not that Stiles and Scott got the memo. They seemed to think it was their mission in life to get Lydia to talk about Allison lately. They’d brought her up three times since Monday, and every time Lydia practically ran away, fast as her heels would allow.

She knew they were trying to help her, but she just wasn’t ready. How was she supposed to explain to them that just hearing Allison’s name had the power to completely destroy her? They probably thought she needed to “process” her grief, or something. But Lydia just…can’t.

Scott and Stiles pick her up in the Jeep, both wearing clean black suits, and without their usual level of hair gel. Lydia allows herself the small satisfaction that Allison would approve. The ride there, no one speaks, but Lydia catches Stiles eyes in the rearview mirror several times. She tries to put on a reassuring face when it happens.

Wordlessly, they take their place next to Mr. Argent in the front row. Lydia sits between Scott and Stiles, ready to jump into action if either of them need her, because thinking about how they feel is still so much easier than thinking about herself.

A minister who didn’t even know the first thing about Allison stands up to say a few truly meaningless words about her. Lydia doesn’t really listen to any of it. Whatever he’s saying, it’s not good enough for Allison. None of it is. The weather, the speeches, this huge, ridiculous crowd of people that didn’t even really know her. The fact that the funeral is even happening.

Lydia decides to tune all of it out. Instead, she watches a ladybug slowly make its way up a blade of grass at her feet. She doesn’t look up again until the coffin has been lowered all the way down.

She doesn’t cry during the funeral. She can’t help it, her heart doesn’t feel like it belongs to her anymore. It’s six feet underground, with Allison.

* * *

Everyone else seems pretty convinced that it's over - but Stiles is still waiting for the proof.

Or, more accurately, he's been waiting to feel like himself again. To wake up and feel at home in his own skin, and just _be_ Stiles without having to try so hard to do it. To feel like his life has finally clicked back into place.

Of course, so far - nothing. In the meantime, he's forcing himself through the motions, doing his best to act and move and talk like the old Stiles would have. Which is difficult, since the old Stiles has been scooped out, leaving an empty shell that just looks remarkably similar. He has to keep trying though. Maybe, if he keeps this up long enough, doing the things old Stiles would have done won't feel so unnatural. Hopefully he can just slip back into his life and keep the absence unnoticed.

Since this is the only plan he has, he's sticking to it. Even on days like today, when the prospect of attending Allison Argent's funeral had current Stiles frozen in park in his driveway, because an overwhelming guilt was threatening to choke him. In that moment, he was desperate to run away, or go back inside and hide, or just _stop_ completely, and just cease to exist rather than face what he'd done. But old Stiles made him put the jeep in reverse and drive to Scott's - because of course old Stiles would have just gone to the funeral.

It goes without saying that the funeral makes the top ten of shitty days in Stiles’ life. But after the service, in Scott’s driveway, something surprisingly good happens. Lydia, without saying anything or checking to see if it was okay, just gets out and starts to follow Scott to the door - stopping halfway to turn back and make sure Stiles is coming.

He's grateful for the excuse to go inside with them without being the one to ask, because he’s pretty desperate to keep from admitting how nervous it makes him to be alone, these days. It’s even worth the overwhelming guilt every time he looks at Scott and Lydia. He’d rather be around them, thinking about how much he’s ruined their lives, than be alone, looking over his shoulder, trying to convince himself that he's awake and everything around him is real.

Of course, Stiles can’t bring himself to actually tell them any part of all that. He can’t stand the worry in everyone’s eyes anymore. Anger, sure. Unease, he’d get it. But everyone around him just seems so…concerned. He can tell they don't see this whole thing the same way he does. To them, this isn't something Stiles had any part in. Just something that happened _to_ him. And they're worried about him because of it - they all want to know if he's eating enough, or getting enough sleep, or if the nightmares are gone.

Honestly, the answers are always no, but he's not going to tell them that.

They practically watch him shifts. When they all go back to school, even though for once no one is making them, his friends manage to find him in between every class. And after school, everyone always has some plan to spend more time together ready to go. If Scott has to leave to go work, Kira suddenly needs someone to help her with her car. And after that, Lydia shows up to study like clockwork, and when she leaves, Stiles dad is suddenly all about bonding, and wants to watch a movie or something.

Maybe the old Stiles would have been irritated about it, but really, it’s just a relief when the next person shows up. When he's alone there's something putting pressure on chest, making it harder to breathe.

Malia’s become part of it too, the last couple of days. She comes over a few times with everyone, to work on human/werecoyote stuff, and when the rest of them leave, she stays behind, to “study” - which really means to make out with Stiles.

If he wasn’t such a selfish asshole, he’d probably put a stop to it, since he’s basically the last person that deserves to have a hot girl make out with him. But with Malia, things were so much easier than with everyone else. Stiles can’t look at Lydia, or Scott, or even Kira without guilt ripping open a hole in his stomach, but Malia doesn’t know or even really care what happened. Her life was hardly affected by it, which makes her the only person in Stiles’ life that doesn’t feel like some collateral damage to his mistakes.

With Malia, he doesn't have to pretend to be the old Stiles, because she doesn’t even know the difference. She won't keep tabs on how often he counts his fingers.

Now, in Scott’s kitchen, Stiles tries to inconspicuously read Melissa’s shopping list on the fridge - to make sure he can still read it, just in case. Although apparently it wasn’t so inconspicuous, because the look on Lydia’s face clearly says she saw it happen, and she knows why. Luckily, Scott speaks before she can do anything about it.

“I know what we need to do.” He looks up at this, catches Stiles eye and motions to follow him. Scott leads him to the linen closet upstairs, pulls out all the sheets and blankets, piling them into Stiles arms.

On one of the worst days of Stiles’ life, after the last funeral he went to, he’d ended up right here in this same exact spot, holding sheets and blankets just like today. His dad sent him home with Scott that day – probably so he could go to the bar – and Scott’s mom had to run to the hospital to cover for someone. So Scott and Stiles had ended up sitting awkwardly on the couch in silence, still wearing their funeral suits, Stiles trying not to say anything too depressing, but thinking of nothing very good. Suddenly, Scott shot up to his feet, saying, “I have an idea, come on!”

They raced up the stairs, grabbed every blanket, pillow, and sheet they could find, and built a pretty magnificent fort in the living room, like it was just a regular weekend and they were having a regular sleepover. They spent the rest of the day in the fort, ate all the junk food they could get their hands on, and played video games, and Scott actually made Stiles laugh a few times, which he’d thought might never happen again. The memory causes a smile to creep onto Stiles’ face as they drop everything downstairs, ditching their suit jackets and rolling their sleeves up to the elbow.

Lydia is very hesitant to get involved at first, but when Stiles starts to hang a sheet at what is _so obviously_ not the correct angle for optimal fort size, she can't help herself.

Twenty minutes later, they have built the most impressive pillow fort created by human, werewolf, and banshee hands. Scott and Lydia smile as they look it over, and Stiles feels a little bit of the weight lifting off his shoulders. Maybe this is exactly what he needs - just pass old Stiles completely and go back to when he was a kid.

And just like when he was a kid, Stiles lays down inside a room made of sheets in the middle of Scotts living room, still wearing the suit he’s just worn to a funeral.

Lydia crawls in last, lies down between Scott and Stiles, and they all fall silent, staring up at the ceiling of blankets. Lydia, in Stiles' perpheral vision, is fidgety. She's twisting one of her rings around and around on her finger while her eyes dart around like she's solving an equation written into the pattern on Scott's comforter.

It's because the distracting part is over, Stiles realizes. There's nothing to stop her from thinking about Allison, right now.

Even this new Stiles hasn't been able to ignore what she’s doing. Scott noticed it too. She thinks she can avoid her own grief by thinking about other people, that she can just keep herself busy and it won't catch her. Stiles knows he should probably just leave it alone - but he can’t. Allison would be so pissed if he just let Lydia destroy herself like this. Besides, old Stiles was always saying things without really thinking them through. So he says it. “Remember when Allison drove like four hours out of town to follow the cross country bus?”

His words hang in the air for too long, and Stiles can feel Lydia tense up next to him. But before she can run away, Scott joins in, smiling softly, “She was so worried about us.”

Stiles turns to look at Lydia now - she's completely still, starting at the ceiling and looking completely drained.

Maybe it’ll always be a little painful to be around her, and maybe he’ll never really be able to give her back the old Stiles, the one that spent so much energy trying to make her laugh, thinking he could trick her into falling in love with him. Maybe that guy is dead and all that's going to be left is this cheap imitation, but at least he can give her this. He can show her that forgetting a person doesn't make it any less unbearable that they're gone. That remembering them is the only good thing left to do.

He just has to keep her from running away this time.

She turns to look at him, scared, pursing her lips together. Asking if he's sure about this. He gives her a slight nod, to tell her she can do it.

She blinks hard, then turns to look back at the ceiling, one tear sliding down the side of her face. “You know, she just left her car on the side of the road that day,” she says, struggling to keep her voice even, “we ran out of gas, but she couldn't let you out of her sight. So she just left it there. Her dad had to drive her all the way back out the next day to get it.”

Scott laughs, “Really? Just on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere?” Lydia nods. “Of course she did,” he says, “she was always so selfless.”

At this, Lydia actually smiles a little bit. “Yeah, she was. And fearless, too. She was never afraid of anything.”

“Oh my god, she was,” Stiles adds, “I think Derek was always a little afraid of her, actually.”

“Well,” Scott says, laughing, “she did try to kill him...a few times.”

Lydia starts laughing, and it's watery and not happy, per say, but it's definitely a laugh - Stiles realizes it's been a long time since he's heard one from her. “One time,” she says, “She tased Peter. Right in the neck.”

Scott turns to look at Lydia and Stiles, and says, “Oh my god, she tased me too! Peter and I have that in common!”

And suddenly, they're all laughing, as if they've never heard anything so hilarious, until they're all doubled over, but they can't stop. And Stiles doesn't want to - it feels so good to have a smile on his face, to be next to his two best friends in a fort made out of sheets. So absurdly normal.

Finally, they calm down and fall back into a comfortable silence.

“She would have loved this,” Lydia says, peacefully, “she would have thought it was ridiculous and she probably would have rolled her eyes at it, but then she would have loved it.”

They spend the rest of the day in the fort, mostly telling stories about Allison. Mostly ones that make them laugh. The way she always saw the best in people. The way she didn’t give a shit what anyone thought about her. How unbelievably unfair it is that she’s gone.

When they run out of stories, they watch bad reality TV, and they stay at Scott’s house about four hours past what’s probably understandable on a school night, but Scott doesn’t seem to mind. Stiles thinks maybe he’s not the only one that doesn't want to be alone.

And at the end of the day, they know - Lydia’s right. She would have loved this.

* * *


	5. Distance Between Two Points

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Filling in the blanks to make a version of season 4 that doesn't make me so angry.

_ Just the right amount of cream in this coffee. Winter break starts tomorrow. We’re getting our tests back in Calculus today. _

Lydia releases a deep breath, relaxing her grip on the steering wheel. This is what she spends a lot of her time doing, these days: closing her eyes and forcing herself to think of three good things - any three good things happening right now. It always feels a little stupid, but the alternative is drowning in the endless pit of everything else, so Lydia sticks with it. 

She makes herself repeat the mantra one more time before leaving her car. Mornings are hard - she’s always half-expecting to see Allison in the crowd of people walking to class.  _ Coffee. Winter break. Calculus.  _

It started as something more scientific, really. Lydia knows that every positive thought is strengthening the connection between the neurons in the part of her brain that feels happiness, and that eventually those synapses will fire instantly because of it, and being content won’t feel like such a struggle. But it’s also working quite well as a distraction. Every time her heart starts plummeting into the floor because she’s just seen something that reminds her of Allison, she diverts all of her brain power to the challenge of finding three good things.

Most days it's enough. She can get out of bed, and sing along to the radio, and just focus on being grateful that she was lucky enough to have known Allison at all. 

Of course, some days (a few more than Lydia would care to admit), good things don’t matter. New stores might be opening at the mall, but Allison is still dead and the world is still a horrible nightmare of a place, and Lydia can hardly breathe because it's pushing in from all sides, crushing her. 

Sometimes, on those days when she can't think of a single good thing, when all she can do is crawl back into bed and curl up around the pain in her chest, she pulls up Stiles’ contact in her phone.  She watches her finger hover over the call button for a few minutes, because some small, buried part of her that’s desperate to hear his voice is begging her to press it. (She doesn’t. She never does.)

On the outside, it would appear that Stiles was handling everything better than the rest of them. Lydia knows better. She can’t help but notice it: the way he only smiles or laughs when he knows someone is looking at him; that his jokes fall a little flat because they’re being forced; how often he tries to discreetly count his fingers under his desk in Econ. She can see the gears turning behind his eyes, trying to figure out what the old Stiles would say or do. 

But he might never be the old Stiles again. That spastic boy with the buzz-cut who used to follow her around so excitedly is probably gone forever, and Lydia knows that the Nogitsune won, in the end. 

(Although, honestly, Lydia doesn’t care which version of Stiles he is. She mostly just wishes he wasn’t so  _ broken.) _

The rest of the pack seems content to accept his happy, recovered facade, so Lydia keeps her mouth shut. But really, it’s glaringly obvious that he isn’t okay. At least, it’s obvious to Lydia. Maybe she’s the only one seeing the way his smiles, even the upside down ones, don’t quite reach all the way up into his eyes anymore (the way she knows they used to).

When she’d started cataloguing all of this information about Stiles, she has no idea. She certainly didn’t  _ decide  _ to. One day she just looked up and noticed that he was wearing the same T-shirt that he’d worn the day before, just under a different plaid, which meant he hadn’t slept - or even gotten in bed, which meant he’d been on some research spiral, which meant he’d sat down after dinner to ask the internet some question about the supernatural, and the next thing he knew he was reading a detailed description of the history of butter versus margarine as the sun came up. And Lydia realized she knew these things because she really  _ knew  _ Stiles. To the core of all 206 of her bones.

 

What she doesn’t know is how to break apart the tension that has been slowly settling between them since that day in the fort in Scott’s living room. Or how to reach him across the distance forming because of it. 

  
  


She finds her friends at a table in the courtyard, helping Malia do some last minute cramming for their history quiz this afternoon. Lydia takes her usual seat next to Kira, as Malia says, “- but who let them build the wall?”

“No one really let them, they like...owned that half of Berlin.” Scott explains. 

“They  _ owned  _ it? They won so they just took half the city?” Malia says, looking up from her book, a crease between her brows.

Scott nods. “Pretty much.”

“And no one stopped them.” 

“No one wanted to start another war.” Stiles adds in.

Malia rolls her eyes, slamming her textbook closed in frustration. “History is stupid. People were horrible and I don’t understand any of it and I'm going to fail.”

“You’re not going to fail.” Lydia assures her, “You’ll see - you’ll be surprised how much you remember.” 

“Besides -” Kira places a perfectly manicured hand on Malia’s arm. “My dad knows about the whole….Coyote situation. And even though you did _ kind of _ try to eat me - he wouldn’t fail you.” 

The first bell rings, causing Malia to groan, but stand and collect her books anyway. Kira, Malia and Scott continue their conversation while heading off to the left, leaving Stiles and Lydia to walk in the opposite direction. They make it all the way to Lydia’s locker without saying anything - a bitter, hollow pain in her chest reminds her that, really, they should be in the middle of a heated debate about something ridiculous by now, like whether mermaids would need to swim constantly to survive like sharks or not. They would have been, a few months ago (back when this walk to first period was one of the best parts of Lydia’s day).

“So...got any plans over the break?” Stiles says finally, leaning against the locker next to Lydia’s. She wonders if he’s aware that he’s blinking just a little too frequently. 

“I might spend a week or two with my dad in Sacramento, I haven’t decided yet.” She says, turning her attention to her combination.

This, of course, is a total lie. One that Lydia’s been keeping in her back pocket, because while, yes, she loves her friends, she would also like the opportunity to just...stop. To just stop being  _ Lydia Martin _ for a while, and just waste away in her bed for a couple weeks without anyone calling her to check up on her. Just two weeks without seeing the pity in Scott’s eyes when he smells the grief that rolls off her in waves. (Or the way Stiles just avoids looking at her all together.)

There’s no way Stiles actually believes that she’d willingly spend a week with her dad, even for a second - (he always seems to know she’s lying before the words even come out of her mouth) but he nods anyway. Looks at his shoes and mumbles “Oh, cool.”

Because this is what they do now. Keep each other at arm’s length, smile politely, look down, make sad attempts at small talk. She pretends she’s not desperately trying to put walls back up around herself. He pretends he’s not helping her build them. Lydia closes her locker and they continue the walk into class.  _ Coffee. Winter break. Calculus.  _

 

Later, when Lydia is finally free to give some casual goodbyes to her friends, drive home, and fall back onto her bed, and relief at  _ finally _ being alone is coursing through her, she tells herself that it’s normal to want space. That this is a normal, human thing. That she’s fine  - even though lately it feels more like her rib cage is housing a crater than a heart. 

She’s fine.

 

The entirety of Winter Break turns out to be too much to ask for. 

Scott arrives unannounced around 8 o’clock on New Year’s Eve, wearing a ridiculous bright green knit hat and reminding Lydia that he can hear her heartbeat when she stands on the other side of the door, deliberating on opening it for too long.

“Look,” He shouts through the door,  “I know you want time alone lately or whatever, but it’s New Year’s Eve! Lydia! Just come with me.”

Finally, she opens the door because  _ of course _ Scott’s here to invite her to a party. Of course he’s trying to give everyone something good.  And he grins at her under that stupid hat and the expression on his face is so sweet and full of good intentions that she almost abandons the possible excuses she has piling up in her head. Just as she opens her mouth to set one free (because she can practically hear the documentary section of Netflix calling her name), Scott speaks again, this time low and quiet, the grin fading from his face. “Lydia, I know it’s gonna be hard...but that’s why we should all be together.” 

Lydia purses her lips. He’s right. Tonight is the start of the first year that Allison will never get to see, and the thought has been causing a painful tightening in Lydia’s chest all day.

“Fine,” she says, voice cracking. She hasn’t had much use for it lately. 

So, against her better judgement, Lydia pulls on her coat and climbs into the passenger seat of Scott’s Mom’s car. 

And even though parties are more Pre-Supernatural Lydia’s scene, it’s not a bad night. Scott put an abysmal lack of effort into decorating, and the beverage station only consists of a few two-liter bottles of coke and just one lonely Jack Daniels bottle, but it feels good to be around her friends, pretending to be normal teenagers for a bit.

They order pizza and take turns picking board games from Scott’s cabinet to pass the time until midnight, and by the third game (Clue, Stiles’ choice), Lydia realizes that she’s actually having a good time. Not just thinking about how Allison would want her to have fun, but actually having it. Sitting between Kira and Malia, laughing at the boys’ stupid jokes, with good music drifting out of the speakers, she feels happier than she’s been in a long time. And  _ maybe  _ the Jack Daniel’s and the warm, lazy feeling it gives her as she pours more of it into each drink might have a little bit to do with that, but to Lydia the distinction doesn’t seem very important.

Five minutes to midnight, Lydia returns from mixing another whiskey-coke to find everyone in the living room, gathered around the television to watch the ball drop. 

“- it's just something you do at midnight, like for good luck.” Stiles is saying as Lydia reaches the doorway, “didn't you see people kiss on New Year's when you were a kid?”

Malia’s brows crunch together, trying to remember. “We never did much for New Year’s when I was a kid. I might have been sleeping. But that sounds...nice.”

Stiles gives Malia one of those upside-down smiles of his and drapes an arm around her shoulder, and suddenly Lydia feels completely removed from everyone. Scott and Kira are standing close to each other, doubled over laughing about something, Stiles is apparently making plans to kiss Malia at midnight, and Lydia is frozen in the doorway behind them, with no one.

Instantly, she feels herself slip off the edge of the delicate line that separates drunk happiness and drunk sadness. It’s too much. Allison’s absence is tangible - pressing in from all sides with enough force to grind her into dust. She bolts back into the kitchen and out onto the back porch before she starts crying in front of everyone. 

She sits on the bottom step, curling her entire body up tightly to hold in the ragged sobs fighting their way up her throat. When she’s able to breathe again, she can hear her friends chanting from inside, counting down the last ten seconds of the worst year of Lydia’s life. The porch is spinning and the grass at her feet is swelling up like waves on the ocean, but when she closes her eyes all she can see is Stiles’ smiling at Malia, repeating over and over, and she can’t help but feel like something’s been stolen from her. 

She looks up to the starry night sky, wracking her brain for three good things, but there’s nothing. “I’m sorry, Allie,” she whispers, “I’m trying, but...” 

The rest of her words die on her tongue. She looks down into her drink, and throws it as hard as she can into the darkness of Scott’s lawn.

She feels...stupid. Stupid for coming to this party, for pouring so much whiskey into her cup, for having these feelings for Stiles. Stupid for not realizing it until it was too late. Because now she’s here, crying alone, and he’s inside, kissing a blonde bombshell who’s also funny, and strong, and practically perfect. (Honestly, couldn’t Malia at least have a hunchback or  _ something _ ?) 

As nice as it would be, Lydia just can’t make herself hate Malia. It’s not her fault that she came into their lives just as Allison left them. It’s not her fault she figured out what Lydia had been too oblivious to see until she was too broken to act on it. The worst part, really, is that if she’s honest with herself she can’t even be mad at Stiles, either. She knows it wouldn’t be fair of her to expect him to wait around forever while she dissects her feelings to figure out what she wants. But only having herself to blame doesn’t make seeing them together hurt any less. 

She felt like she had so much time, before. She thought Stiles would always be this _maybe,_ _someday_ sort of thing, and that would never change. But she’s not a _someday_ in his eyes anymore. She’s a _never._ An _almost._ And there would just always be this lingering _almost_ thing rotting between them, because they’d missed their chance. 

It’s a strange feeling - to miss something so deeply, to feel it burning between your ribs, down to your bone marrow, only to realize you never actually had it at all. 

 

The sound of the door opening behind her jolts Lydia out of her thoughts. She wipes her face quickly with her sleeve, even though it’s pointless because the person walking over to her is Scott, who surely heard her crying from inside.

“I’m fine.” She says as he sits down on the step, “Just drunk.”

Scott answers by pulling two water bottles out of the pocket of his hoodie and holding one out to her. As she takes it, he jerks his head in the direction of the red solo cup in the middle of the yard. “Are you  _ littering _ , Lydia Martin?” 

Lydia surrenders a watery laugh, leaning in to rest her head on his shoulder. 

They sit in a comfortable silence for a while before Scott speaks, his voice low. “I miss her too.”

Lydia feels another tear escape and drop onto his shirt. “How do you do it? How are you so...okay?”

Scott lifts up his arm to wrap around her shoulders. “I’m not, really. I don’t know if it’ll ever get easier, you know? Maybe we’ll spend the rest of our lives missing her, but...I don’t know, it’s like...like I’m carrying her around with me now. Like she’s always with me, and it makes me feel braver, I guess. Because she was so brave. I know she wouldn’t want us to quit.”

Lydia nods, letting a few more tears fall because she’s too inebriated to make a decent effort at stopping them. 

“I know what you mean,” she says thickly, “if I don’t want to get out of bed, it’s like I can feel how disappointed she is.”

“So what do you do?”

“It’s gonna sound dumb but...I make myself think of three good things.”

Scott rests his cheek on the top of her head. “So what are your three good things right now?”

She takes in a shaky breath. Sloppy, drunk sobs are jumping around in her chest, fighting to break free.

“I’ve got nothing.”

“Hmmm...okay well, look up. The stars are really pretty tonight, aren’t they? That’s a good thing.”

Lydia pulls her head off his shoulder to see that he’s right (despite the fact that they keep swirling around and the sight makes her a little nauseous).

“Mhm.”

“And let’s see, what else? Maybe how you completely destroyed everyone at Trivial Pursuit earlier?”

“You guys really shouldn’t have let me pick a game.”

Scott laughs. “Okay, one more thing. You got one?”

Lydia considers for a moment. “I have you as a friend.” she says finally, “And saying that was so cheesy, I think I’ll go and vomit now, excuse me.”

Laughing, Scott holds up his water bottle in front of them. “Happy new year, Lydia”

She taps her water against his. “Happy new year.”

 

* * *

 

Stiles had been making himself so anxious, it was almost a relief when Derek went missing. Okay, well, not that he was relieved that Derek had been kidnapped, obviously - but just that something was happening. Ever since things had calmed down, he couldn’t stop looking over his shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

Now, things are crazy again - there’s Liam, and the berserkers, and the assassins popping up everywhere trying to murder his friends. The twisted thing is that Stiles actually prefers it this way. Now that the next crisis is happening, he can stop driving himself insane trying to guess what it’s gonna be. 

He’s still freaking out, as usual, but at least his brain has a direction to focus on. Lying awake at 3 in the morning, biting his nails and overthinking everything serves a purpose now, anyway. 

He taps his fingers on the steering wheel as he nears Lydia’s street. Hopefully she hasn’t already left, he’s not entirely sure of the specifics for her plan today. All he knew was what Malia had mentioned last night at his kitchen table, after catching him up on the cypher key they’d figured out while he was at the lacrosse game.

“She might not like me very much anymore,” she’d said, offhandedly, “she kind of snapped at me today - I might have pushed her a too hard. Are you gonna eat that?” She gestured to the last piece of pizza sitting between them.

Stiles shook his head, guilt already starting to swirl around in his stomach. “What did she say to you?”

Malia shrugged, taking another bite of pizza. “Something about not being able to turn her powers on, and having voices in her head. I think she’s just getting really stressed about this whole deadpool thing. She is worth a lot of money.” 

She said everything so casually, like Lydia being stressed was typical, nothing to worry about, but Stiles knew better. His head was buzzing with all the things he’d noticed recently, but put away because he wasn’t supposed to be noticing things about her anymore. Dark circles under her eyes, and chapped, unpainted lips. How much time she’d been spending up at her grandmother’s lake house. She was cracking, falling apart slowly, and no one was doing anything to stop it. 

_ Because that’s your job _ , he realized with a punch of guilt to his gut. He’d always been the one, sometimes the  _ only _ one, paying attention to Lydia. Making sure she was okay. He realizes, now, how he’d been slowing walling that part of himself off. Letting everything he’d done settle on top of him like a thin layer of dust that he’d been afraid to disturb. 

“Anyway,” Malia continued, “at least we got the key. Lydia’s gonna try to get in to see Meredith again tomorrow, maybe she knows more.” 

She stood, brushed the crumbs off her hands, and gave Stiles a quick kiss before leaving to go home and check in with her dad. By the time the front door swung shut, Stiles had already decided to go with Lydia the next day.

And, sure, maybe he doesn’t exactly remember how to be that Stiles that was always there for her, but this - this impulsive unannounced drive to her house, where he’ll insist that under no circumstances is she going to do this alone, this feels like a good first step. Like something Old Stiles would have done. Something good. 

 

“I can handle this myself, you know.” Lydia says, rolling her eyes when Stiles explains why he’s there. 

“I’m sure you can, but I’m here, so you don’t have to. So, where are we going?”

Lydia scrutinizes him with squinted eyes for a second before returning her attention to putting her shoes on. “You’re not gonna give up on this, are you.”

“Absolutely not.” 

He catches a microscopic smile on her face as she turns to grab her purse. “Fine. We’re gonna go show Parrish that he’s on the list so he’ll get us into Eichen to talk to Meredith.”

Hearing the word Eichen makes his blood run cold for a second. He wouldn’t let any of his friends - especially Lydia - go to that hell hole alone. 

 

Of course, when they leave it with blood drying down the side of Lydia’s face, he wishes he hadn’t let her go at all.

“So, what now?” he asks as they pull out of the parking lot.

Lydia pinches the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know. I’ll probably go back up to the lake house, see if I can....”

She trails off, sounding so exhausted and powerless and just  _ small  _ that it makes Stiles’ skin crawl at the wrongness of it.

Before, there would have been no question that their next step was to set up camp in front of his bulletin board, to figure this out together. He’s suddenly very aware of the weird, strained distance he’d been letting grow between them, because it had seemed easier to give her space, even though now it feels more like he’d just straight up abandoned her. 

She doesn’t speak again until he passes the turn for her house, to tell him he missed it.

“We’re not going to your house.” he replies.

“Stiles, come on. I really need to figure out this code.”

“Yeah, why do you think we’re going to my house? Now that I’ve made the upgrade from string to tape I can’t go back, okay? Besides, you don’t even  _ have _ a bulletin board in your room anyway, so that’s obviously not gonna work.”

She stares at him with wide eyes, dumbfounded, for a long time, before her lips twitch into one of those small, genuine smiles that Stiles hasn’t seen directed at him in a while.

He runs with it, delving into his case on why tape is so much better than yarn, coming up with the stupidest reasons just to make her laugh. And when she does, Stiles realizes how easy it had come to him, not forced like most of the jokes he’d been making lately. For a second, he actually feels like he _ is _ Old Stiles, not just pretending to be. 

The rest of the afternoon feels so natural, after that.

When they get inside, he catches another glance at the blood on her face and acts purely on instinct - wetting a washcloth and crouching down in front of where she sits perched on the edge of his bed. Cradling the other side of her face gently with one hand, he carefully wipes the blood off from under her ear. When he’s finished, he finds her staring at him like he’s a ghost, eyes wide and glassy, filling up with tears.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” he whispers, setting the washcloth aside.

Lydia wipes her face, looking everywhere else in the room but at him. He’s about to speak again, to tell her she can tell him anything - when the words start flooding out of her mouth. 

“I can’t do this, Stiles. This isn’t like the other times, we don’t even know who we’re fighting, and everything is hinging on me figuring out these keys. And if I can’t figure this out soon everyone’s going to die.” She starts speaking faster, nearing hysterics, “I don’t know what I’m doing, okay? I’m not a good enough banshee to save everyone, I don’t know how to stop this, and I -”  
“- Hey, hey, okay just, breathe for a second, okay?” He interrupts her, laying a hand over both of her own where she’s been twisting them together in her lap. 

“Look,” he continues, “I know we can figure this out. That’s what we do, right? We’re the brains of this whole operation, aren’t we? If anyone can do this, we can.” 

She takes a deep breath before nodding at him, lips pursed together, but somehow it doesn’t feel like enough. Shame starts scratching around in his stomach - he knows this is his fault. He’d just let her get so lonely and strung out and had been too selfish to do anything about it.

_ “Don’t make me lose you, too”  _ she’d said. The only thing she asked of him, and he completely blew it.

“I’m sorry, Lyds.” he says, dropping his voice so low it’s almost a whisper, “I...I know I wasn’t...there.” He focuses his eyes on the carpet, choking on the rest of what he’s been trying to say.

His words lie like a landmine between them for a while, until he feels one of Lydia’s small hands flip around to squeeze his own. “I know.” she says carefully. “It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay.” he says a little too sharply, meeting her eyes. “It’s not, but...you don’t have to do this alone anymore, okay?” 

She smiles at him in a soft, delicate kind of way, and then abruptly, as though he’d shocked her, she’s pulling her hands out from his, standing up. “So,” she says with a thinly veiled tremor in her tone, “what now?”

“Uh, yeah,” Stiles stands. “So...I’m gonna go get us some snacks, so we aren’t sleuthing on an empty stomach, and then we’re just gonna bust this whole thing open and save everyone, right?”

Lydia laughs. “Right.”

 

A few days later, he’s the first one she calls when she finds out her grandmother’s ashes aren’t real - and it’s like a gear somewhere in him is clicking back into place.

 

* * *

 

_ Leaving Derek’s, Parrish is fine. Want me to bring anything to the hospital?  _ She types out, listening to the click of her heels on the pavement as she makes her way to her car.

Her phone buzzes almost immediately.  _ Stiles: I’m heading home actually.  _ Before she can reply, it lights up again,  _ Stiles: you can meet me there if you want though. _

She translates that in her head to mean that he doesn’t want to sit alone at home, worrying about his dad (and the bullet lodged in his shoulder) all night. She decides to pick up food on her way there, since she’s pretty sure he’s forgotten to eat. 

(She’s right.)

“So how is he?” She asks, when she arrives, dropping a fast food bag on the kitchen counter in front of him.

Stiles gives up biting his thumbnail to answer, “Good, he was good. Surgery tomorrow. They gave him some stuff for the pain and then he told me to go home right before he fell asleep.”

The fist clenched tightly around Lydia’s lungs releases its grip. 

She’d been ready to drive the Sheriff to the hospital herself, but he insisted that someone needed to take Parrish out of there before anyone else saw him, burnt and wild-eyed as he was. She’d agreed, if only because things couldn’t be that bad as long as the Sheriff was still capable of cognizant speech.

After dinner, they head up to Stiles’ room to get back to work - Lydia pulls out the photo of her grandmother and Stiles adds it to the board with a long piece of red tape. Having another cypher key to unlock isn’t something Lydia necessarily wanted today, but the task feels a lot less daunting here, with Stiles. 

They fall into their usual routine easily, starting with some research on Lydia’s grandmother, grasping at straws for a word she might use as a key.

 

“What is it?” She asks, after seeing him check his phone only to drop it angrily on the desk for the 100th time. 

Stiles leans back to look at her, running both hands through his hair. She looks pointedly at his phone and then back up at him. 

“It’s Malia,” he starts, “she uh...kind of found out about the whole Peter thing.”

“You told her?”

Stiles grimaces. “Not….exactly.”

Lydia raises her eyebrows in response.

“Yeah. So she’s pissed, obviously, because we’ve all been lying to her this whole time. And she's not speaking to me right now.”

Stiles sighs, and some buried part of Lydia’s brain knows how easy it would be to ruin their relationship in this moment. With a few words she could turn everything around and have Stiles all to herself. Certainly the old Lydia (Pre-Werewolves Lydia) wouldn’t have hesitated. Old Lydia would have him wrapped around her finger, his girlfriend a distant memory.

But the idea makes her feel sick more than anything else. She’s not wired that way anymore, and even though she knows it’s still going to hurt to see them together, she's completely incapable of sabotaging something that she knows makes him happy. Because underneath all the broken glass of whatever this  _ thing  _ is between them, she’s still his friend. And if she must, she can certainly be  _ just _ his friend. 

“She’ll come around,” she says, in her best casual voice, “she probably just needs some space, but I’m sure once she’s finished processing this she’ll be back. She knows you wouldn’t do anything to hurt her.”

Stiles smiles softly at her, and maybe it’s not the worst thing, to just be his friend and do nice things without getting anything out of it. It’s the right thing to do, anyway. Lydia can lean back on the moral high-ground the next time she’s sees them together and wishes she had a cliff to fling herself off of to get away from them.

 

Sometime after four, Lydia decides to call it and head home to get a little bit of sleep before school. She returns a few hours later, at seven, with coffee and donuts, because she’s pretty sure Stiles overslept - but she arrives to find that he hasn’t slept at all. 

In her absence, he’s rearranged the entire board, and printed out several pages of myths involving banshees. He’s currently seated in front of his computer, eyes frantically scanning the page. He’d changed clothes, at least, but judging by the crazed look in his eyes and the dark bags under them, he certainly hadn’t stopped since she'd left. 

“Are you going to make it to school today?”

Stiles almost jumps out of his chair, having been so focused he’d missed all the noise she made coming in. 

She holds out a coffee in apology for scaring him, which he takes gratefully, before shaking his head to answer her question. “No on the school thing. I can’t attend more days than I miss, Lydia. They might raise their expectations.” 

Lydia rolls her eyes, moving around the desk. “Alright, well move over then.” 

“What?”

“Please, we’re reading Hamlet in Lit today, what are we, twelve?” Lydia replies, dropping her purse on the floor. “Besides, there’s obviously no way you’re figuring this out without me.”

Stiles stands to offer her the chair in front of the computer. “Fair point.”

She pulls up the research he’d been working on, and she must admit - things are so much better now than they were a few weeks ago, when all she could do was stare at a record player and let all the unanswered questions grow like thorn covered vines between her ribs.

This partnership she has here with Stiles, safe in the warm glow of his desk lamp and the tested method they’ve developed here that’s given them so many answers before - it’s the constant she’s been missing. A red string, holding her together.  Anchoring her to the ground again.

So, it doesn’t matter how much it’s going to sting to just be Stiles’ friend. To see him in love with someone else. For this, it’s worth it.

 

* * *

 

“You’re not taking me to the station, are you.”

“Nope.” 

Stiles groans. “I’m fine, seriously, Lydia. I don’t need to go to the hospital.”

“You have a concussion.” Lydia fires back sharply, “And last I checked I’m the one in the driver’s seat, so you don’t really have a choice. You are definitely going to the hospital. ”

Stiles drops his head back onto the headrest, annoyed. Again - nothing good ever comes from going to Eichen. Even Meredith being alive, which should have been a positive thing, is a kind of overshadowed by the realization that she might be trying to kill all of them. 

And then there was the whole almost dying at the hands of Eichen’s head asshole, but that was really just the cherry on top.

In all honesty, Stiles is still a little dizzy from Brunski’s punch to his head - but the hospital seems excessive. Especially when he really needs to be at the station - unraveling whatever the hell Meredith had been talking about. 

“ _ Lydiaaaa  _ seriously I don’t -”

“Stiles.” she snaps, turning to him with more anger in her eyes than seems proportionate to the whole situation. “You’re going.”

She turns back to the road, and Stiles notices her hands shaking slightly on the wheel. 

“Are  _ you _ okay?” 

She flicks some hair away from her face. “I’m fine, he barely touched me.”

“Okay...you seem kind of anxious...though.” he says carefully, “You sure you’re okay?”

“I just - I didn’t know who it was going to be.” she says impatiently.

“Who what was gonna be?”

Lydia sighs. “I had a banshee...thing. It was about Brunsky, I guess, but...I didn’t know who. I knew someone was going to die, and then he was going to you with that needle and…”

She trails off, determinedly looking everywhere but his direction and biting down hard on her bottom lip.

It’s strange, seeing her worrying herself into a frenzy like this. Normally that’s his thing, and she’s the calm one, talking him out of his own head.

“Yeah, that was scary for a minute there,” he says in what he hopes is a reassuring tone, “but it’s okay now. We’re alive, we’re okay. It's all fine -”

“No, it's not fine!” She shouts, “Nothing about that was fine. And you have a concussion, and -”

“I'm fine, really! Lydia, I'm perfectly okay, I didn't -”

“You almost died! I thought you were going to, and Stiles, if you die, I -” She takes in a shaky breath as they pull up to the front door of the hospital. “Just...just please go let Melissa check you out, at least?” Something in her tone is so exasperated, Stiles has to accept defeat.

“You call me if something happens, okay?” he says from the sidewalk, through the open window.

Lydia just nods as she pulls away, leaving Stiles with whiplash that he’s pretty sure has nothing to do with the blow to his head. 

 

* * *

 

 

Things calm down again, eventually. Just like they always do. Berserkers and assassins give way to final exams and dress shopping for Prom.

The last day of junior year is gorgeous, the sun already absolutely dazzling by the time Lydia arrives in the high school parking lot. She sits in park for a moment, watching everyone walking in and wondering if their lives will always be this way - constantly swinging on a pendulum between crisis and normalcy (well, as normal as they can get, anyway). 

She’s just about to close her eyes, to focus on pulling three good things out of the air to carry around with her today, when she’s distracted by a knocking to her left and a smiling Scott McCall on the other side of her window. She grins back, opening her door to walk in with him. 

They find their friends at their usual table in the courtyard, where Malia proudly holds up a quiz with a bright red “B-” on it, and Kira reminds her to bring her Pride & Prejudice DVD for their girls night tonight. When the bell rings, she walks to her locker with Stiles at her side, rambling the whole way, sharing all his opinions on the new Spider-Man reboot coming out next month. She feels his fingertips on the small of her back as they walk.

It turns out Lydia doesn’t really need the three good things, after all. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Lmao look who finally updated her trash fic after almost a year.)
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!! Comments would literally make my day, and you can find me as mrtinsky on tumblr if you want to chat!


	6. The Riemann Hypothesis

“Oh hell no. No funyuns, Stilinski.”

“What? What’s wrong with funyuns?” 

“I do not want to be surrounded by the smell of onions for the rest of the evening, thanks.” Lydia fires back, placing the bag back on the shelf.

“But Lydiaaaa,” Stiles whines, leaning forward onto the cart handle, “we can’t go back there with just candy! We need sweet _ and _ salty, it’s the cardinal rule of snacks.”

Stiles takes snacking far too seriously for someone who looks skinny enough to be knocked over by a strong wind, Lydia thinks. He was the one who had insisted on interrupting movie night at Scott's house to go on a food run. 

Lydia was the only one who hadn’t flatout refused to join him, but she didn’t mind. She’s pretty sure she's not missing much in the mindless action movie that had been on when they left. Besides, Stiles is good company for errand-running - he’s determined to act like a child at every grocery store he finds himself in. (“Grocery stores are really just giant candy stores that happen to have a bunch of extra stuff,” he’d reasoned when she brought this up to him once, last summer.)

Lydia snags a party size bag of tortilla chips and tosses it on top of the ridiculous pile of chocolate and gummies Stiles has been building in the cart, followed by a jar of salsa. Stiles nods his approval, pulling himself up onto the cart with one foot and kicking off with the other.

“Alright, what else do we need? Soda?”

“Yep.” Lydia answers, following alongside Stiles and the cart at a leisurely pace, “Liam asked us to get cherry Pepsi.”

“Ew, Pepsi? Seriously? And to think I was just starting to warm up to him.”

“Wanna get him something totally different and just act like it’s what he asked for?”

“Ooooh yes, something even more disgusting than Pepsi. Ginger Ale?”

She scans the shelves of the soda aisle wickedly. “Even better. Seltzer.”

Stiles laughs with his entire body, his head rolling back. “Perfect.”

Lydia feels a wide smile spreading across her face, and lets herself appreciate the easy friendship she’s fallen into with Stiles over the summer. One where they can just  _ talk _ again, and argue, and laugh. One where Stiles isn’t constantly trying to distance himself, and Lydia doesn’t find an unintentional edge in her voice in everything she says to him. 

When she has downtime between the college classes she’s been taking, Lydia’s been spending a lot of time with her friends - soaking up whatever normalcy they have, acting like normal teenagers while they have the chance. 

With Kira gone for the summer, Lydia spends a lot of time with Malia, who (despite Lydia’s best efforts, sometimes) grows on her more and more each day. She comes to Lydia’s house when she needs help with her summer classes - and Lydia must admit, after missing eight years, it’s impressive to see how quickly she’s catching up.  And even though she refuses to even try on any of the several dresses Lydia offers (because really, she’d look amazing in one, and makeovers truly give Lydia inner peace) it’s nice to finally have a friend that will actually go dancing with her, so she really can’t complain. 

And even though it still stings a little to see Stiles with her (giving her those soft looks that used to be specifically reserved for Lydia) she doesn’t mind, much. Stiles happiness seems more genuine, lately, and her own doesn’t feel so forced, either. And that's enough, for now. 

Since the end of junior year, it’s felt like everything is slowly easing back into place. Like a field of flowers is being planted in her chest, in the crater that had been left there when Allison died. 

Suddenly, Lydia’s pulled from her thoughts as the temperature in the aisle drops drastically. She whips around, arms crossed against the cold, to ask Stiles if he knows what happened. He’s starting intently at the shelf, but something’s wrong - there’s a dark trail of blood making its way down his face from his left ear. She practically runs the short distance to him, instantly on the edge of hysterics. 

“Stiles? Are you okay?”

He’s unfazed, doesn’t even look in her direction. “No, Scott doesn’t really drink soda. Actually we should probably grab him some orange juice while we’re here."

“What? Stiles, you’re bleeding.”

“You good with coke? We can split it? I’ll even suffer through diet if you want.”

“Stiles!” Lydia reaches out and grabs him now, physically putting herself in his line of vision.

He seems to snap out of something, abruptly, his expression immediately turning intense. His eyes flit across her face frantically. “Lydia, look at me,” he says, harsh and serious, “you’re gonna make it.”

“What? Stiles -”

She starts falling before she can finish her sentence. The hard ground rises up to meet her, but when it does, it’s not hard at all. It’s soft as she slams into it, the back of her head held up by a pillow. When she opens her eyes, it’s not the bright fluorescently lit ceiling of the grocery store she’s expecting. It’s the same dim, yellowing, water-stained ceiling she’s been staring at for god knows how long.

The grocery store, with Stiles...that was in July. 

How many months ago that was, exactly, Lydia has no concept. How long has she been here? Weeks? Longer? It doesn’t matter, really. She’s already dead. She knows, without a doubt, that she’ll never leave Eichen. She’ll never leave this bed, even. The endless, deafening screaming in her head will kill her, soon. 

What little energy she has seeps out of her. It’s exhausting, being awake. She wishes she could go back to sleep, live out whatever time she has left pretending to be at that grocery store with Stiles. Here, her entire body aches. Her head is throbbing in between levels of excruciating pain. It’s every banshee feeling she’s ever had, multiplied exponentially. 

Hopefully, the off-book ending to her dream doesn’t mean anything. If there’s anything good left in this world, she’ll die soon - before her friends try to save her, while they’re still far enough away to be safe from the destruction she’ll leave in her wake. 

She’s painfully aware of the miserable truth - that she was always going to end up here. She was always going to die like this, locked away, losing her mind. Like every other banshee she’s ever known. She’s almost glad Valack had drilled that hole in her head. It will spare her from years of this, stretching out ahead of her, turning her into something unrecognizable. 

Something in the air shifts, sending her heart plummeting into her stomach. She knows he’s here before he enters the room. Panic starts to push on the sides of her rib cage - he can’t be here. He’ll die. Now, when Lydia dies, it will be with the horrible knowledge that she’s killing him and everyone that came with him. People she loves.

He shouldn’t be here, but he charges in anyway, not knowing he’s running toward a bomb.

 

* * *

 

Stiles tried to just go home and go to sleep like everyone else. Really, he did. And, yes, he  _ is  _ currently sitting in his jeep, parked across the street from Lydia’s house at almost two in the morning, but that’s beside the point. The point is, he’d tried.

It didn’t seem like he had any other choice, when everyone had finished hugging Lydia and Ms. Martin had gone to pull the car up to take her home. There was no plan in place for this part, and while Stiles was scrambling to put something together - like taking her to Scott’s house, or Argent’s secret bunker, or, better yet, getting her the hell out of Beacon Hills completely - everyone else seemed to decide that the whole nightmare was over, and it was time to go home. 

He was forced to agree, because really, who was going to come after her? Theo had only been there to get to Parrish. He doubted the orderlies at Eichen would go to the trouble of trying to get Lydia back, especially since Valack was the one who’d wanted her all along - and he wouldn’t be doing much of anything anymore. Deaton seemed confident that the mistletoe would hold up. There was no immediate danger, as unconvincing as that felt.

But it really boiled down to the fact that if anyone deserved a peaceful night in their own bed, it was Lydia. He couldn’t take that away from her just to ease the irrational tightening in his chest. 

So, despite the fact that every one of his brain cells was screaming at him not to, he carefully helped Lydia through the maze of broken glass and into the passenger seat of her mom’s car. Let them drive away, swallowing down the panic clawing its way up his throat. 

He’d tried - honestly. He got in his jeep and drove home, reasoning with himself the whole way that everything was  _ actually fine _ . That Lydia was safe, and alive, and that she was just going to go home and go to sleep and nothing bad was going to happen. He deliberately drove right past the turn onto her street, ignored his rapidly increasing heartbeat, and made it all the way to his own driveway. 

He’d even reached up and let his hand hover over the keys, ready to kill the engine - but that’s as far as he could get. 

And now he’s here - acutely aware of how excessive and paranoid he’s being, but also significantly less anxious - watching the window he knows is hers. 

Of course, it’s been completely quiet for the nearly three hours he’s been here. No sign of movement in the house since Lydia’s bedroom light went off a little after midnight. She’s definitely asleep by now. Everything’s okay, and Stiles should definitely go home. He knows he should. Over the last hour he’s been periodically telling himself that he will, really - after fifteen more minutes.  _ Just in case.  _

Okay, maybe he won’t actually leave until the sun comes up, but even then, it’s fine. Lydia won’t ever know he was here.    
  
At least, that’s what he thinks until his phone buzzes with a text from her that reads,  _ “You might as well just come inside.” _

His brain shorts out for a second, and when he looks back up at the house, she’s there. Holding the front door open in shorts and a baggy sweatshirt, looking right at him. He absent-mindedly reaches for the handle, missing it a few times before getting the door open and making the walk up her driveway.    
  
He pieces together a few less embarrassing excuses to explain what he’s doing here, but they disintegrate in his head the moment he reaches her - because she looks so  _ small.  _ There isn’t room in his head for anything else. Did she really look this small earlier? Maybe it’s just that it’s been awhile since she stood next to him without heels on, or that she’s in her pajamas, without her usual mask of makeup and clothes and some intricate hairstyle. But it’s more than that, he realizes with his heart dropping to his stomach - she looks  _ fragile.  _

He hadn’t caught it, earlier when everything was happening. How unhealthy she looks, how much weight she’d lost in the last few weeks. He can see it, now, in her face, where her cheeks are too thin, too pale. She’d washed her hair and somehow fit all of it into a little bun on the top of her head, which is good, but really just makes it easier to notice how slender her neck is, and lets him see the dark, dried up mixture of blood and mistletoe that she hadn’t been able to wash away.  Her lips, which should be some vibrant shade of red, should be spread into a smug grin at catching him like this - are chapped and barely twitch up into a tight, tired smile before she turns to lead him inside.

He follows her as silently as he can, trying to focus on minimizing the sound of his feet on the stairs rather than the nauseating ache spreading up from his stomach. 

Once they’re safely in her room and she’s shut the door quietly behind them, she turns and finally meets his eyes. He’s expecting her to make some biting remark, to tease him about how creepy it is that he'd been doing a full blown stakeout on her house, but she doesn’t. Instead, she focuses on the side of his face, her brows crunching together in worry. “You didn’t go home at all, did you.” 

Before he can answer she’s steering him toward her vanity, pointing out the trail of dried blood from his ear in the mirror. He’d forgotten all about it. The fact that she’s concerned about a little blood on his neck when he’s fighting the urge to literally wrap her in a suit of pillows held together by duct tape is so ridiculous he could laugh outloud. 

“I tried?” he whispers, shrugging his shoulders. She rolls her eyes in answer, then reaches down and grabs some kind of makeup wipe, which she shakily holds out to him. 

She watches him clean up with a sad expression and crossed arms, and when he turns back to look at her, he catches her swaying a little bit - like it’s been an effort just to stay standing this whole time.

“Hey,” he starts in a low voice, closing the distance between them and reaching up to grab her shoulders, “did you sleep at all?”

She gives him a slight nod, but won’t meet his eyes anymore, and presses her lips together tightly.

“ _ Oh _ ...Nightmare, huh?”

Lydia focuses on a far off place somewhere near the floor with a hollow look in her eyes, and nods again.

He instinctively starts running one hand up and down her arm. He freaking  _ knew _ it was a bad idea to let her go home alone. “Do you wanna try and go back to sleep?”

“No. Maybe later…I’m just...” She trails off there, pursing her lips together around the end of her sentence. 

“Worried you won’t wake up here?”

Her eyes snap to his, wide and glassy - a look he translates to mean he’d guessed right.

“Yeah...I know,” he says softly. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No. Can we just talk about something else, please? Anything else.” 

He tries not to fixate on the raw, broken quality in her voice. “Yeah.”

 

They sit next to each other on the bed, propped up against the small mountain of useless decorative pillows Lydia owns for whatever reason, several textbooks and notes spread out in front of them in the soft glow from the lamp on her nightstand. One subject at a time, Stiles talks his way through the notes he’d taken for her in the classes they have together, and the messages from her other teachers he’d been asked to pass along. He can actually see the stress rolling off of her by the time they get to her math class; her shoulders lowering, muscles relaxing a little more with each new equation she copies down. 

She starts in on the math homework she’d missed immediately - quickly filling up pages with neatly written numbers and letters in between sips from the glass of water Stiles had insisted on sneaking down to the kitchen to get. She explains everything she’s doing in a low whisper as she writes, using a lot of big words that Stiles kind of understands separately, but that together sound like a completely different language. Not that it matters - he doesn’t need to understand it. He’s happy just letting her voice wash over him like a calm summer rain, soft and warm. Content, _ finally. _ Safe.

Eventually, her head drops onto his shoulder and her numbers start looking less and less immaculate, and he has to intervene. “Hey,” he bumps his shoulder lightly, lifting her head, “you need to sleep.”

“No.” She says, leaning back to look at him apprehensively. “I’m okay.” 

He raises his eyebrows at her, so she’ll know he sees right through that sad attempt to hide how exhausted she really is. “Lay down at least?” 

He can actually see the fear creeping back into her body - her breathing getting faster, her knuckles white as she tightens the grip on her pencil. “I can’t….I don’t want to sleep.” 

“I know.” He slowly reaches down to slide the textbook out slowly from under her hand. “But you have to, okay?” When she doesn’t move, he continues, “I can stay, if you want. I can be here the whole time, and make sure nothing happens. I promise, you’ll wake up right here. You’ll be safe.”

She gives him a hard, scrutinizing look. “You’ll be here when I wake up?”

“Yeah.”

She considers this for a while, searching his eyes for something. “Okay,” she says finally, pushing herself off the bed to gather up the books. “But you need to sleep too.”

He’s not sure how to respond to that - it’s not something he’d been expecting her to say. Her eyes narrow at the indignation on his face as she pulls back the covers. “Stiles, when is the last time you slept for more than four hours?”

Alright, he has to admit, she’s got him there. “Okay, but averaging four hours of sleep is actually totally normal -”

“Normal? For who?” She fires back, “Serial killers? Vigilantes?”

“I was thinking more like single moms, you know, taking classes at night to better their lives, but yes, actually, vigilantes probably don’t have a lot of time to sleep and... _ oh my god _ , Lydia...I just realized... _ I am  _ a vigilante. I’m actually,  _ by definition, _ a vigilante! I’m just like -”

“Oh,  _ god _ , do not say you’re Batman right now.”

“But I’m  _ basically  _ Batman!”

Lydia rolls her eyes dramatically. “If anything you’re like...that guy that tells Batman where to go. Or the butler.”

Stiles drops his head back against the headboard, whining, “Lydia can you please stop crushing my dreams and just let me have this moment, okay? Would it kill you to just let me be Batman?”

“Fine,  _ Batman _ \- shut up and get under the blanket.” Her voice is full of obvious annoyance, but he catches a furtive smile on her face before she clicks the lamp off and climbs back into bed. 

“Thank you! See? Is it so hard to let me have something that brings me joy?”

“Oh it’s excruciating.”

Stiles laughs, turning on his side to face her with about a foot of empty space between them. The fourteen year old Stiles that still lives in the back of his head somewhere will probably rear his buzzcut sporting head tomorrow, freaking out about laying in the same bed as Lydia Martin - but after everything that’s happened, it feels like nothing. They’re both such different people, now. And how he feels about her or felt about her or any of it, it’s not important. Nothing matters except the fact that she survived - that she’s breathing and making jokes, that he’s able to be here with her at all. 

It’s so dark he can barely see her face, but in the moonlight streaming through the window he can tell her eyes are still wide open. She’s still afraid to fall asleep, and the observation prickles like needles up the back of his neck. It’s something he remembers vividly, and he wouldn’t exactly recommend the experience to anyone else. 

He can’t take much more of this, this delicate silence where both of them know the other is awake and something is obviously wrong. Not that he can blame her - even now, after everything, Lydia still hates opening up and being vulnerable. And maybe he should respect that, and just let it be. 

But the thought of just lying here, saying nothing, leaving her alone with whatever's keeping her awake...

He wants desperately to be able to open up the top of her head like the cover of a book, and read what she’s thinking. To put it all up on a board and piece it together with string and figure out a way to fix it. 

For now, he’ll settle for whispering, “You wanna talk about it?”

Lydia chews on her bottom lip for a while before answering. “I’m okay. I just...when I slept earlier I was back there. I dreamt that I was waking up in that bed, and I uh...I never really left. Getting out was just something I imagined, or something. And then I woke up and I just  _ panicked. _ I had my coat on, and shoes, and I actually had my keys in my hand...I was ready to run. Somewhere far away from...I don’t know, everything.”

“What stopped you?”

“I, uh...I saw your jeep, actually. I was grabbing my purse and I saw you from the window.” 

He feels something warm spreading through his chest. “Oh...really?”

“Yeah. How long were you there?”

“Couple hours. I tried to go home but...I couldn’t do it.”

Her lips press together into a sad, delicate smile. “I’m glad you couldn’t.”

It's not lost on him how rare it is to see this unfiltered version of Lydia. One that can flat out admit that she’s afraid, can talk about what she’s feeling. The one that only exists late at night after something terrible has happened, when she’s too shaken up to run maintenance on the walls she builds up around herself in the daylight.

“So…” she continues, “is everyone else okay? Nobody...nobody got hurt trying to get me, did they?”

She says it like she’d feel guilty if anyone had - he lets out an aggravated sigh involuntarily. “Lydia, yes, our friends with the supernatural ability to heal are  _ fine _ . You’re the one who -”  he stops there. He doesn’t need to hear himself say it out loud. 

“I’m fine.” 

“I know.” He replies. He doesn’t believe her for a second, but she sounds more convincing than the last time she said it, at least. 

“Scott’s okay?”

“Yeah. Kira came and picked him up a little after you left.”

“What about Malia?”

“Uh, I don’t know.” Lydia pointedly makes a confused face in response until he explains. “We sort of...broke up.”

“Oh,” 

She doesn’t ask him to go into it, but he knows he has to anyway. He’d known all day, somewhere in the back of his head, that once they got her out he was going to have to tell her about everything that happened while she was gone. And about the things he just thought he’d have more time to tell her. About Donovan. She’d hear it from someone else eventually, but he wants her to hear it from him.  _ Someone _ should hear it straight from him.

He takes in a deep breath, ignoring the way his entire body has started shaking. “I - I need to tell you something…” he starts, and just like that, he can’t stop talking. It all pours out of his mouth like some horrible black tidal wave that Lydia just lets crash over her, saying nothing, making no visible reaction. 

He finishes the story, and Lydia still hasn’t said anything. A needlelike panic starts scratching around his chest, sure that she’ll be angry. That she’ll hate him, finally. In all honestly he’s kind of hoping she will. But he won’t be able to handle it if she does, even though he knows he’d deserve it. 

So he just keeps talking, desperate to delay the moment when it's quiet and he can see all the damage his words have caused. He can’t stop, now, and suddenly he’s into the territory of things he hasn’t even been letting himself think about, let alone tell anyone. “You know it’s been a year, now? Since the Nogitsune.” He hears himself say. “I uh...I was just starting to think things were okay. Things were back to normal, or...I don’t know. And then this…” 

The truth of what he’s about to say hits him then, closing up something in his throat. “What if...it chose me for a reason? I mean, we all opened that door to our minds, but it chose me. And what if - what if it chose me because I was already the most like it? Maybe I was always gonna be this way, you know? Maybe there was always something...bad in me, and - ”

He doesn’t realize how fast he’d been talking until Lydia cuts him off by actually reaching over to cover his mouth with her hand. “Shhhh, Stiles,” she whispers, and her voice isn’t angry or full of fear. It’s a little sad, maybe, but soft. 

When she speaks again, it’s slow and measured. “Stiles, you are  _ nothing _ like that thing. You never were, okay? It lived on pain and suffering and you...you were the one that would cause us the most pain. Do you remember how you were back then? Your only weapon was a _ baseball bat.  _ You were the one that was always flailing around and making jokes. Reminding everyone to be human. Seeing you so...not  _ you _ \- that was what hurt us the most. You’re a good person, Stiles. You always were. And it knew you were the only one that would blame yourself for everything it did. That’s what it wanted.”

If he analyzes it too much he’ll realize everything she’s saying is too good to be true, but it all sounds so logical, so plausible coming out of Lydia’s mouth. He lets himself cling to every word like a life raft. 

The air feels lighter now, somehow. Like everything he’s done had been living in between his ribs, like a sharp, twisted up weed - one he didn’t realize had been growing until now, as Lydia’s words pull it out, all the way down to the roots. He nods at her, hoping his eyes show all the gratitude he knows he’ll never be able to find words to cover. 

“I get it though…” She continues, “I mean, I - I killed Valack, didn’t I?” Her voice breaks on the name, and Stiles reflexively reaches for her hand where it lays in the space between them. “I screamed, and...and his skull was -”

“Lydia, after everything he did to you -”

“I know. I don’t...feel sorry for him. I can’t. I know it was just something I had to do to survive, but…” 

“But you wish it wasn’t.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. Me too.” 

Lydia squeezes his fingers with her own. “Yeah.”

It’s unbelievable, how good it feels for someone to just  _ get it. _ To just understand that this is the way it is - that saying “self defense” doesn't magically make everything okay, but that what happened doesn’t have to destroy them, either. 

And even though he’ll probably never really be able to forgive himself completely, maybe he can at least live with himself. 

She asks if they can talk about something else, something nicer. So he tells her every dumb story he can think of from when he and Scott were kids, letting his voice get softer with each one, until her eyes finally drift shut. 

 

* * *

 

Lydia opens her eyes a few hours later to find the room bathed in early morning sunlight, and Stiles putting on his shoes, hastily whispering that he can hear her mom moving around the house. He climbs out the window clumsily, promising to text her later, and from her bed she watches his jeep pull away and down the street. She tells herself it doesn’t make her anxious. She’s fine. 

She decides to take a long shower, distracting herself with carefully washing her hair and putting every product she owns into it (shuddering to imagine how long it had gone without conditioner, even). She stays in until her fingers are wrinkled beyond belief and the entire room is thick with steam, letting the scalding water wash every last trace of Eichen off of her. 

When she’s done, she wipes the fog off the mirror and inspects her reflection. It’s a little too pale, and is staring back at her with eyes that are wide and sunken in - but still looks more like herself than the one she saw last night. She nods at it, feeling stronger than she’s felt in a long time.

Since she’s not sure where she’ll be going or what she’ll be doing today, she throws on some leggings and a tank top for now, and heads downstairs hoping her mother’s already put on a pot of coffee. She’s barely down the stairs when a voice that’s definitely not her mother’s calls out to her from the kitchen. “Lydia! Just in time.”

It’s Stiles, cleaner and in a different shirt than last night, standing in her kitchen with a frying pan in one hand and a spatula in the other, adding another pancake to a stack on the table in front of her mother. She’s caught off guard for a moment - he’d said he’d text her later, not show up at her house in half an hour to play Martha Stewart in her kitchen. (Although, really, she’s not complaining. Her house feels a little warmer, somehow, with him in it.)

“Hey sweetie,” Ms. Martin says, gesturing at Lydia to sit next to her at the table and filling up a mug with coffee for her, “Stiles came over to make us breakfast. How are you feeling?” 

“I - I’m good,” she answers, taking in the rare sight of her kitchen actually in use - bowls and utensils spread across the counter, pans Lydia wasn’t even aware they owned on the stove, a spot of flour on Stiles’ forehead. “Did you actually make pancakes from scratch? I didn’t know you could cook.” 

Stiles huffs indignantly, turning off the burner and joining them at the table. “Don’t sound so surprised, I have talents.”

Lydia lets out a small laugh as she pulls out her chair to sit down, relieved (far beyond what she’d ever willingly admit) that he came back.

Breakfast is a little awkward, though not altogether unpleasant. Stiles sneaks an extra four pieces of bacon onto Lydia’s plate when he thinks she’s not paying attention, and she plays along because everything tastes amazing. Plus, when her mouth is full she doesn’t have to participate in the small talk Ms. Martin and Stiles keep making, as they both pretend not to be staring at Lydia out of the sides of their eyes when they think she can’t see them.

They’re both obviously on edge the entire time, trying way too hard to make everything feel normal, all while watching her wearily like she’s a bomb that might go off any second.

She knows they’re just concerned, and after what happened they’re right to be, but she’s already growing tired of feeling their eyes on her. They’re treating her like she’s made of glass, and it’s exceedingly agitating. She can’t go on like this all day, being handled like she might physically shatter into pieces at any second. 

So, when her mom mentions that she’d be missing the school board meeting she was supposed to attend this morning, Lydia puts on a show of insisting she go. And her mom agrees, despite acting really reluctant about it. It’s understandable. Lydia wouldn’t want to spend all day with a reminder of her guilt, either. 

Besides, last night everything had been so emotional - her mom had spent the entire car ride home crying and apologizing repeatedly, and once they got inside, had hugged Lydia so tightly she thought her ribs might break, apologizing again. So now, like always, they would give each other some space and pretend none of it had happened for a couple of days. Which is fine with Lydia. She prefers it this way, actually. 

One less person to have to convince that she’s okay. 

Ms. Martin heads upstairs to get ready, returning twenty minutes later to not-so-subtly make sure Stiles will stay with Lydia while she’s gone. Then she kisses the top of Lydia’s head and walks out the front door. Stiles starts gathering up plates from the table as they hear her car start in the driveway.

“So,” She starts, in her strongest and most casual sounding voice, “what’s the plan?”

“Uh, what plan?” 

“Maybe the plan for the giant monster currently attacking Beacon Hills?”

Stiles turns and leans against the counter, mouth spreads into a wide, dramatic frown. “Nope, no plan for that. The plan for  _ you,  _ however, involves going nowhere. And naps. And maybe some soup.”

Lydia lets out a frustrated groan. “Stiles -”

“Fine, I’ll let you do some homework, too, okay? Happy now?”

“Stiles. I’m  _ fine.  _ Okay? I can help. I don’t need naps.”

“Lydia it’s just one day, you can -”

“I’m fine!” she snaps at him, standing up abruptly. “I am completely fine. I’m going upstairs to get ready, and when I come back down here you’re going to tell me the plan and we’re going to go do something productive.”

With that, she turns on her heel and saunters off before he can react.

She stomps up the steps (maybe a little more dramatically than is really necessary), planning out a killer outfit in her head - one of her shorter dresses, something that will go with one of her tallest pairs of heels. Then she’ll do something with her hair, some kind of braid to hide her injury, and then she’ll give herself a full face of makeup, topped off with dark red lipstick. And then she’ll stroll downstairs and right outside before Stiles can stop her - right to the passenger seat of the jeep, her heels making bold, satisfying clicks the entire way.

But something stops her before she can make it all the way to the bathroom. One of the frames in the hallway is hanging crooked, her freshman yearbook photo. She reaches up, intending to fix it, but finds herself pulling it off the wall instead, to get a better look at it. She remembers taking the photo, but there’s something... _ wrong _ about it. Like it isn’t really her. 

She searches the face in it frantically for something, anything, that she can recognize. There’s nothing. The girl in the photo is too comfortable, too happy, too whole. Her life is full of books that she has time to read just for fun, magazines, homecoming dresses, boys to kept interested and a student body to be reigned over. Her world is small, one where everyone adheres to the rules, and she’s  _ safe _ . Powerful, even. 

God, when was the last time Lydia felt that powerful? When she looks inside herself now, there’s only an overwhelming fear of everything she knows is so much stronger than she is. Just an unyielding black hole of helplessness. When did that happen? When did she become this empty, crumbling shell around a heart that just feels like a graveyard?

It’s too much, right now. Too much death, too much agony. She feels it all falling on top of her at once, all of the horrible things that are about to happen to the girl in the photo - there’s nothing she can do about it. It’s unbearable.

She slides down to the floor, still clutching the frame, and suddenly she’s sobbing hysterically - practically screaming in the strangled, quiet way her damaged vocal chords can manage, gasping for air that her lungs won’t take. 

Is her life always going to be like this? One crisis after another, a relentless cycle of death and misery, on and on until she has no one left to lose and nothing left of herself? At this moment, Lydia would give anything -  _ anything _ \- make it all stop. To go back to being that girl in the photo. That normal,  _ human _ girl, with no graves to visit and no holes in her skull. 

Warm hands cover her own, and gently pry her fingers out of the tight grip she’s had around the sides of the frame.  _ Stiles.  _ Finding her again. The photo is pulled out of her view, and she feels his arm around her shoulders, pulling into the space between his legs, leaning her side against his chest. She presses her face into his sternum, roughly pulling on the side of his open flannel with both hands. 

She lets herself cry violently, with her entire body -  everything that happened pouring out of her, unraveling from the tangled up mess it had been in her chest. It’s ugly, and mortifying, and completely out of control, but Lydia doesn’t care enough to make herself stop. She’s in a different world, here in Stiles shirt - with his body sort of haphazardly wrapped around her, one hand rubbing a circular pattern on her back. Nothing can get to her here. 

Later, (after what’s probably been entirely too long to be even remotely dignified on her part) her tears run out, and her breathing slows back down to a normal level. She leans back, bracing herself for the pity that’s surely all over Stiles’ face - but there’s no sadness in the way he looks at her. Only a relaxed focus she’s never really seen on him before. It’s similar to the way he scrutinizes his investigation board - the same concentration is there - but his eyes are softer, radiating warmth. 

“You wanna stand up?” he says, low and rough. She nods. 

They break apart and stand up slowly, carefully extricating themselves from the entanglement of limbs they’d been in. When they’re fully upright, he keeps both hands wrapped around her upper arms, his thumbs moving gently, up and down. After a minute, he seems to decide on something, and wraps one arm around her shoulders, turning her around. He delicately steers her toward the stairs, and she lets him, feeling numb in a way that isn’t entirely unwelcome. 

They walk slowly like this all the way to couch in the living room, and she collapses onto it immediately, exhausted. Stiles disappears from her line of sight, but returns quickly, holding out a box of tissues. When she’s finished wiping her face, he extends his other hand, holding a glass of water. 

“Drink the whole thing, okay? I’ll be right back.” She takes one long sip, really only to appease him, until he backs out of the room and sprints upstairs - returning a moment later with blankets and an annoyed glance at the amount of water left in the glass where she’d set it on the end table. 

He drops the blankets next to her on the couch, then reaches past her to grab the glass, pointedly holding it in front of her again. He stands next to her looking stern, with crossed arms, until she drinks all of it. Then he takes it from her, walks back to the kitchen and returns with it completely full again. This one, he sets on the table, and then he turns to his new mission of making Lydia comfortable - dropping a pillow on one end of the couch and gesturing at her to lay down, and then draping a blanket carefully over her. 

Maybe she’s just too drained from the crying, but she’s not annoyed by the attention. Even if she was, she’s too tired to fight him on it. He’s certainly not asking her for permission, anyway - she’s not sure she could stop him fussing over her if she wanted to.

He settles himself floor in front of her, leaning back against the couch, and starts flipping through television channels, announcing the options. He must remember that she doesn’t watch much TV, because he doesn’t tell her the titles of the shows to see what she wants to watch. Instead he says things like “Cooking competition? Ghost investigators?”

They settle on game shows, like they’re kids staying home sick from school, even though apparently it’s a Saturday. It’s a good distraction, answering the questions before the contestants, listening to Stiles make jokes when the people on TV get it wrong. 

Around ten he disappears to the kitchen for a while, and returns with a plate stacked with eggs and toast, which he sets on the coffee table. Lydia sits up, and he plops down onto the couch next to her, handing her a fork and pulling the table closer.

“Hey, Stiles?”

“Yeah?”

“We already had breakfast.”

“And?”

Lydia pointedly checks the time on her phone again. “It’s too early for lunch, sooo?”

“Oh, no. This is second breakfast, actually.”

She raises her eyebrows at him. “Second breakfast?”

“Don’t even act like you haven’t read all the Lord of the Rings books, Martin. I saw them on your shelf.” Stiles reaches for a piece of toast. “We’re living like hobbits today. And you’re already short enough, so we’re halfway there.”

“Ha ha,” she says in a flat tone, “hilarious.” She rolls her eyes, but loads up her fork with eggs, anyway, and catches him grinning in her peripheral vision.

The rest of the day, he never lets up on the whole hovering caretaker thing, but he also never once asks her to talk. Doesn’t ask her if she’s okay, doesn’t press her to explain why she’d been crying upstairs. And he won’t, which is something Lydia is deeply grateful for. She’s so tired of thinking about her feelings. She’s tired of reaching into herself and cutting her hands on all the bits of broken glass. 

Instead, she lets herself be blissfully empty - she dozes off during bad reality shows and lets Stiles wrap her in blankets. She drinks water when he tells her to, finishes the entirely too large lunch he makes, and attempts to eat at least 10% of the three rounds of snacks he brings her.

Lydia’s mom returns sometime after lunch, happy to find Lydia sitting on the floor, surrounded by textbooks, peacefully writing out the most beautiful and organized history notes she’s ever seen. Something about the mountain of schoolwork is so calming, Lydia doesn’t even feel the need to keep pestering Stiles to tell her about whatever Beast-related research he’s been doing on his laptop for the last hour on the couch behind her. 

The doorbell rings a little after 4 o’clock - Scott and Kira. They come in with the pretense of just dropping off notes from AP Biology for Lydia, but they don’t leave right away. Instead the four of them settle in and look for a movie on Netflix, and they spend the rest of the afternoon in a spectacularly normal fashion - the boys throw popcorn at each other, and Kira french braids Lydia’s hair, and everyone argues over what toppings to get on the pizza they order for dinner.

Watching her friends laughing, with Stiles right next to her, nudging her with his elbow when he makes comments on the movie, slipping another piece of pizza onto her plate - Lydia realizes she'll be okay. Someday, her life won't be such a horror movie, and this will just be another bad thing that happened to her a long time ago. And she'll pack it up neatly into a box and bury it with everything else, and she'll keep going. 

And unlike the girl in the photograph upstairs, she won't be alone. 

 

* * *

 

“Hey, you've reached Lydia, leave a message and I'll call you back.”

Stiles jabs the end call button angrily, grinding his teeth together. “God damnit Lydia answer your phone,” he mutters, his other hand raking through his hair. 

He drops his phone onto the seat next to him and starts the jeep with a shaking hand, wondering if he should drive to the station first or just make the leap and go straight to the hospital. Because Lydia not answering is one thing. That’s relatively common, no need for real concern. But his dad’s cell phone, office phone, the station’s front desk, and two separate deputies’ extensions not answering? More than enough to warrant panicking. 

Best case scenario, she’d just figured out something important and had gone somewhere with his dad to do something about it - although the idea that no one would call him seems unlikely. 

Worst case scenario...well, there are a lot of worst case scenarios. 

He decides to go to the station first, after all. Someone has to be there, someone has to know why Lydia - who had been just fine, an hour ago, sitting on the couch next to Stiles, and had been checking her phone every 30 seconds - has suddenly gone off the grid.

To be fair,  _ fine  _ might not be the most accurate term to describe Lydia earlier that day. Something was definitely off, causing her to snap at him a little more than usual. But it’s been like that ever since they got her out of Eichen, really. Some line has been crossed - Stiles can feel it. And he knows Lydia felt it, too. Like she doesn’t totally know how to act around him anymore, after being so vulnerable over the weekend. Not that he can blame her. He has no idea what to do, either. How do you go back to normal after something like that?

He’s about halfway to the station when his phone starts ringing. He picks it up so violently he almost throws it at himself, shouting as soon as he answers, “Dad? Where are you, what’s happening?”

His dad’s voice on the other side of the line is ragged as he recounts what happened. The beast, Sebastian Valet, at the station, slashing his claws across Lydia’s throat. Darkness starts spreading in from the edges of Stiles’ vision. He already knows first hand what it’s like to watch her die. It’s unbearable - a terrible gaping hole being ripped right through him. He can't do it again. 

“Stiles, she’s fine. She’s gonna be okay,” his dad continues - the words manage to stop Stiles’ throat from completely closing up. 

He pushes the gas pedal as far as it will go. “I’m on my way.”

He tells himself his dad wouldn’t lie to him, and that if he says Lydia is fine, then she is, but he can’t stop himself from worrying, anyway. Or from remembering the last time she’d almost died. It’s like it’s burned to the back of his eyelids, the image of Lydia, so pale in the harsh light of the clinic, glass on her face, eyes closed, unmoving. He can still feel it, the way his heart dropped, seeing Scott shaking his head, knowing he couldn’t hear a heartbeat.

God, what if his dad hadn’t gotten to her to the hospital in time? If she had died, and the last conversation he had with her was this awkward, strained thing, where they talked about twins absorbing each other? Something in Stiles’ chest caves in on itself. 

She’s asleep when he finds her, but soon she’s squeezing his hand in her fingers, her eyes fluttering open. He releases a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. 

None of it matters, really. If they went too far, if something about it freaked her out. How she feels or how he feels or what all the tension between them today meant. Or what happened with Malia. It’s a tangled up mess that he can unravel later. 

Her eyes are open, and that’s enough for now. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Hopefully you enjoyed the dumpster fire that is all of my feelings about Stydia in season 5. Comments and kudos are super super appreciated as always! And feel free to come chat with me, mrtinski on tumblr!


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